Introduced a quarter-century ago, the Oracle database remains the leading enterprise relational database management system (RDBMS) in the world. Oracle is a complex system, offering a myriad of products, languages, and tools. Frequent updates, releases, and editions complicate the ability of Oracle users to keep up with the huge amounts of frequently changing information about the database and its capabilities. The goal of Oracle in a Nutshell is to pull together the most essential information on Oracle architecture, syntax, and user interfaces. The content and format of this book, an admirable addition to O'Reilly's respected In-a-Nutshell line, combine to boil down vital Oracle commands, language constructs, parameters, and file formats in a succinct and highly accessible desktop reference. Oracle in a Nutshell covers the information that database administrators PL/SQL and Java developers, and system, network, and security administrators need as they manage Oracle databases and write code for these databases. It includes:

• Oracle Foundations--Overview of the Oracle architecture (memory structures and fundamental concepts), Oracle's various editions and packaging options, summary of the initialization file parameters and data dictionary views, and fundamentals of Oracle's concurrency scheme, security mechanisms (privileges, profiles, roles), and networking files (TNSNAMES.ORA, SQLNET.ORA, LISTENER.ORA, DAP.ORA, NAMES.ORA, CMAN.ORA) and options.

• Oracle Languages--Syntax summary for SQL language statements, SQL function calls PL/SQL language statements and characteristics, PL/SQL built-in package headers, and Java (JDBC and SQLJ) interfaces to the Oracle database.

• Oracle Tools--Commands provided with SQL*Plus, SQL*Loader, Import and Export, Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) and other backup/recovery methods, Oracle Enterprise Manager, and various performance tuning tools (Explain Plan, TKPROF, AUTOTRACE, UTLBSTAT, UTLESTAT, Statspack).

• Appendixes--Summary of Oracle datatypes, operators, expressions, conditions, numeric and date formats, and resources for additional reading.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 16 Ratings

No Star - 2004-12-14
Reviewer Rating:
Well , yes the so often chosen approach by technical book writers, of lets make it very large with lot's of STUFF, so it sells, which unfortunately most of the time does work. To get to the point, for a software developer, who actually has to produce a system or results outside of academia, this thing will get its best use as a fire starter if one has a fire place.
First of all, it takes far too long to find anything, and once found the description looks often like a hieroglyphic abstraction instead of a short example, (very typical for folks who write books about a subject they do not comprehend them self.) My suggestion, if you are looking for a quick straight forward, and ineligible answer try (ORACLE the Complete Reference), written by the Vice President of Oracle.

Invaluable. But experienced DBAs only please! - 2004-04-23
Reviewer Rating:
When I purchased Oracle in a Nutshell I thought I would need to buy another book for a quick reference to the data dictionary views but to my pleasant surprise these were included too.

A great book but it's not for the weekend-warrior DBA. If you can create indexes, tables, tablespaces, users, instances and databases off the top of your head then you'll love this book. It saves having to wade through all the Oracle documentation to look for less frequently used syntax etc.

Ben

Inconvenient and Uneducational - 2004-02-12
Reviewer Rating:
This book was very disappointing. It contains very few examples of anything. While it is useful (though cumbersome) to determine the syntax of Oracle commands, it provides no examples of how to practically use the commands. It gives me no help in determining what command, function, or package to use, no help in how to use it, only the syntax or declaration of it. I find it far more useful to use one of my other reference books or go to the web; at least there I typically find advice and examples on how to use the commands. The book is of very limited use!.

Everything you need but organization might be better? - 2005-11-11
Reviewer Rating:
I am an experienced developer who purchased this book as a quick reference because I don't always have time to hack through the Oracle documentation. The book has been quite useful and I've found it has everything I need, but it is often difficult to find things because of the way the book is organized.

Specifically, what I find annoying is the lack of complete information all in one section. For example, the entry for TO_CHAR() for dates lists the syntax along with the input and optional mask parameter. The optional mask parameter is labeled dfmt which refers to a list of possible values in Appendix D. No where under the TO_CHAR() entry does it mention that the list of valid date formats is in Appendix D. If you have not used the book in a while, you will forget that the list is in Appendix D and spend the next ten minutes trying to figure out where the list is. FYI, I had to go all the way back to the first page of the chapter to find it. Could the author/editor not have included a small blurb next to the parameter like: (Appendix D)?
Also the SQL*Loader section is a little hard to figure out for those of us who only use that tool every six months or so. It seems I do a lot of cross referencing when I use this book.

All in all this book is accurate, complete, and quite handy. I am not certain how much improvement could be made in terms of expanding the details of each entry with out making the book much bigger, but I hope that some how the author will figure out a way. I look forward to seeing the 2nd edition.

This is sad - 2008-05-18
Reviewer Rating:
This is a prime example of a book trying to be all things and falling to be anything at all.

It is to big to be a quick ref and to small to be anything else.

I had hope that by now there would be a 2 ed based on feedback from readers,but it seems that Oreily is content to leave it as it is.


That is sad for us all but it also means that Oreilly has damaged its brand in my eyes.

Here is what i Said on Oreillys site soon after I bought the work years ago.
---start--
This book could use some improvement. Overall it is good but it fails to take into acccount that not all parts of oracle need to be included in a quick ref.

In particular it tends to ignore the bread and butter of pro-cobol proc

and odbc in favor of more trendy JDBC JSQL etc. This might be forgivable but to include very damn oracle package notwithstanding how likely they are to be usefull to an application programer is not. The book starts to look more like an oracle feature list for presales than a handbook to surive in the trenches. This makes the book far less usefull for me than I had hoped. I expect that I will keep looking for that handbook.
--- END---
In retrospect I think I was too kind, but I was hoping they would improve thier products. I had been an O'reilly fan and customer for years,and so I was hoping, as a customer, to push gently in the right direction.

Well, in any case, O'reilly has left me before I left them. I may buy O'reilly again, but the persumtion of quality and utility is no longer in their favor-- where once I would buy sight unseen, now I must have proof of utility.

I do not know what they are doing to the Nutshell series, but I do not like it.

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