Re: New to Oracle

Hi Daniel,

The Oracle technology Network is a good place to start - it's free to sign up and it
gives you online access to all the Oracle Manuals for 8i and other versions which is very handy as well as useful articles and news. Once you sign up a good starting place would be the development fundamentals manual at http://technet.oracle.com/doc/server.815/a68003/toc.htm . When you want to move on to PL/SQL, admin, or even Pro-C if you have a C compiler these are all covered by other 8i manuals at http://otn.oracle.com/doc/server815.htm .

I would also recommend 'Oracle 8i: The Complete Reference' (Kevin Loney & George Koch) as a good buy if you are serious about learning Oracle - I've been using Oracle for about 4 years and this is my bible. It starts from the basics explaining all the concepts in full and has an eminently useful reference section that gives full syntax and usage info on all commands you could want at this stage. There are additional books on database admin etc. in the series. O'Reilly books are always good - http://oracle.oreilly.com/ - although the pocket guides are only useful once you've got at least a basic understanding as they are really only aide-memoirs.

As to getting started ... Have a think about what you want your database to do and the kind of data you want to put in it and, using the principals of relational database design, put together a rough database design - Loney and Koch Chpt 1+2 explain this but the key is really Normalising your data correctly. Once you have an idea of your table structures and what kind of data you want to store in them you can create your database with a series of CREATE TABLE statements. If you want to be fancy you can create SQL scripts to create them for you so you can drop and create tables at will. Populating those tables is dependant on the data you have and how it's stored
- basic methods are via INSERT INTO statements but you could also create SQL scripts or use the SQLLOADER utility to load prepared datafiles and control it all dynamically from UNIX.

Anyway - hope these pointers are useful and not too confusing. Oracle is really quite an easy package to get to grips with and if you have any experience of programming and / or databases it should be a doddle. Its also pretty powerful and a darn good place to learn about databases and SQL. If the above is a little too much I can point you in the right direction for further information. Good Luck,

Fiona Lewis
Research Fellow
Southampton University
F.M.Lewis_at_soton.ac.uk

"Daniel" <h01_NOSPAM_dankj_at_du.se> wrote in message news:3d500f5e.13136218_at_news1.telia.com...
> Hi!
> I'm really new to Oracle, I have installed Oracle 8i on my Sunblade
> 100 (running soalris 8) with the hope of learning some oracle.
> My "big plan" is to make a database with all my digital pictures and
> descriptions. But that is the far off goal. Right now I want to learn
> the basics both concerning administrating and developing. Does anyone
> have any ideas where to start? Any good sites that start from the
> beginning. Right now I have an empty database and i do not know how to
> put stuff in so I guess that's where I would start. Any advice is
> appretiacted
>
> Daniel
Received on Tue Aug 13 2002 - 16:26:47 CEST