Expert Oracle Database 10g Administration

GRATIANO . . . As who should say “I am Sir Oracle, And when I ope my lips, let no dog bark!” —The Merchant of Venice, act 1, scene 1 Oracle Corporation used to print the preceding quotation from Shakespeare at the beginning of one of its chapters in the Oracle database administrator (DBA) manual (Oracle 6). I always thought the quote was interesting. If you proceed a little further in the play, you’ll find this quotation: BASSANIO Gratiano speaks an infinite deal of nothing, more than any man in all Venice. His reasons are as two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff: you shall seek all day ere you find them . . . —The Merchant of Venice, act 1, scene 1 Bassanio counters that, in truth, Gratiano speaks too much: from two bushels of chaff, two grains of wheat may be recovered. And that’s the raison d’être for this book: to separate the wheat from the chaff. This second part of the quotation is more apt when you consider the difficulty of extracting the right database management procedures from the tons of material available for the Oracle Database 10g database. Oracle Corporation publishes copious material to help you manage its increasingly complex databases. Oracle Corporation also conducts a variety of in-person and Web-based classes to explain the vast amount of subject matter that you need to understand to effectively work with the Oracle database today.