Expert Oracle9i Database Administration

GRATIANO . . . As who should say 'I am Sir Oracle, And when I ope my lips, let no dog bark!' -The Merchant ofVenice, act 1, scene 1 Oracle Corporation used to print the preceding quotation from Shakespeare at the beginning of one ofits chapters in the Oracle database administrator (DBA) manual (the early versions). 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 ofVenice, 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' etre 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 man- agement procedures from the tons of material available on the Oracle9i Release 2 database. Oracle Corporation publishes copious material to help you manage its increasingly complex databases. Oracle Corporation also conducts several 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.