Oracle Beginnings - Where to Start?

Scalli0n asks: "I'm a programmer with a solid computer science background, but I'd like to know where I should start with the behemoth that is Oracle - my bosses tell me that I need to learn it to store geodatabases (since I work with geospatial intelligence) and I have no clue where to start since nobody can even tell me of a good beginners book - any suggestions?"

Comments

oracle classes

[Bluntzilla]

i would suggest seeing if your companmy will send you to a user confrence or some classes for a couple g's

Re:Oracle is overrated

[mrobinso]

If he wants to be taken seriously and he has a solid CompSci background, why is he asking slashdot?

RTFM.

Ask Tom

[the eric conspiracy]

Tom Kyte is a sort of help Guru for the Oracle community. His book Effective Oracle by Design is excellent can contains a lot references to other material.

He also runs a web site that has been very useful to me as well.

Two areas to look at

[richg74]

You didn't actually tell us whether you have any other data base experience. In general, when you're setting out to use an RDBMS (whether it's Oracle, DB/2, Sybase, PostgreSQL, whatever), there are two areas to tackle:

1. A general understanding of how and why relational databases work.
2. The specifics of how to use your particular platform.

(To put it into a more purely programming context, you might think of the first as like what you might find in Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, and the second as like Kernighan & Ritchie's The C Programming Language.)

It's been a while since I used Oracle, so I can't really give you any current recommendations for no. 2. (O'Reilly has some offerings in this category that, in their early editions, were pretty decent.) For no. 1, though, I suggest you pick up a copy of A Guide to the SQL Standard, by Chris Date and Hugh Darwen. Date is one of the "pioneers" of relational data bases, and this book is a good reference to the "why" of how they work.

Re:The best place to start ...

[Naikrovek]

the best place to stay? not hardly. there are plenty of situations where MySQL is the worst place to stay. In those situations, Oracle is worth every penny.

Maybe the best place for you, but to assume that MySQL is the best DB for everyone is just plain short-sighted.

Re:Where to start? Where are you starting?

[Anonymous Coward]

The parent post exemplifies the problem with asking for technical advice on slashdot. It's mostly on target but contains just enough misinformation (for example, the part about using triggers to emulate MySQL's auto_increment [you definitely don't want to use a trigger for that]) to be dangerous. Instead of listening to people on slashdot, pick up some of the better Oracle books:

Effective Oracle by Design

Expert Oracle

Expert Oracle Database Architecture: 9i and 10g Programming Techniques and Solutions

If, as the parent poster inquired, you don't even know SQL or basic relational theory, you'll need a much more fundamental textbook--but since you mentioned Oracle specifically, I'm assuming you're smart enough to know the difference between asking about relational databases in general and a specific implementation of one.

Where to start:

[sakusha]

At the beginning.

I spent many years doing computer tutoring. I was quite successful with one strategy, sitting down with the client and saying, "Let's start on page 1 of the manual."

Your Oracle software came with a manual, right?

Without any doubt...

[Jippy T Flounder]

the best place to start is to find a job where Oracle is NOT a requirement.

I've been working with Oracle for the past year, and suffering every minute of it.

They've constructed an RDBMS with AWESOME potential, but not only is the documentation generally aweful, the system itself is so unnecessarily complicated and, to quote Neal Stephenson, "crufty", that it takes a certain mentality to deal with the myriad little things that need tweaking and tuning (read Oracle SQL Statement Tuning if you don't believe me)... a certain "I don't mind wasting my life on trivialities" mentality.

Now don't get me wrong, I've seen Oracle DBA's do some mind-blowing things, but I've also seen the amount of work they have to put into the little, this-was-supposed-to-take-a-minute things, and quite frankly, it's one hell of a trade-off.

If you're satisfied with dedicating a large portion of your sanity and time, then good luck! Otherwise, keep away. It's for your own good.

I was asked the other day if I would say the same things if I was suddenly offered a job at Oracle, for an unbelievably large sum of money. I thought carefully about it, and came up with the only possible conclusion.
"So long, and thanks for all the fish."