Primary sources

2007-07-19

While there are many Oracle-related blogs, articles, updates and random musings available on the Interweb, I keep coming back and back again to three sources. 1. Oracle Docs - everything you ever needed to know about Oracle is here. And by everything, I do truly mean everything. This is a very powerful tool, but great in size as well and as such, sometimes difficult to sift through. 2. Ask Tom - Tom Kyte has been using Oracle since 1988 and has been working for Oracle since 1993. This site is where you can ask Tom to provide answers to common questions and solutions to common problems you may encounter as a database developer. It is basically a place to turn the theory of Oracle Docs into practice. 3. The Art of SQL by Stephane Faroult with Peter Robson. Oracle documentation teaches you the skills to interact with Oracle and Tom Kyte teaches you how to interact with it wisely. This book takes the knowledge and skills you already have and makes you consider them in situations you encounter in real life. Writing queries is not only about getting the data that you need. It is also about getting ONLY the data you need, making sure the data can be returned to you fast and that you can do so regardless of how large is the set of data you are querying. (And many others things - read the book to find out more!) It is written beautifully and sometimes you will find yourself shamelessly using quotes from it, such as:

"denormalization advocates often suggest it at an early stage in the hunt for "performance" - and in fact often at a point in the development cycle when better design (or learning how to use joins) is still an option."