Welcome

learnOracle takes great pride in welcoming you to its website. You are here because you want to learn, learnOracle. I promise you that during your journey of learnoracle, you will acquire great skills that are required for being a great resource yourself. I have tried to cover almost all of it! But, if some things that you feel, can be added or that are omitted, please let me know and I would try to do my best to rectify the problem. This site will be of no use until you participate in the learning process and tell me on how you feel regarding this. I am always reachable on my mail address which is mylearnoracle(at)gmail(dot)com.

This is my attempt to help more people get familiar with Oracle. Oracle is sometimes considered a difficult database to learn but it is really easy to get started. Like anything as deep as Oracle, it takes time to master but really it is a database for anyone. If you find any good tutorials or tip sites, send me an email and I'll be sure to add it.

There is an area on this site to contact me / send me an email. I would love to hear from you. If you have a question, please leave it as a comment.

What is Oracle?

A Quick Definition

I guess the first question is really, "What is a database"? A database is an organized collection of data. The data can be textual, like order or inventory data, or it can be pictures, programs or anything else that can be stored on a computer in binary form.

A relational database stores the data in the form of tables and columns. A table is the category of data, like Employee, and the columns are information about the category, like name or address.

Some databases have minimal feature sets and only store data, while others include programming languages, facilities and utilities to support enterprise-level applications like ERP and data warehousing. Oracle is the #1 database and has the most advanced feature set.

Oracle is made up of a set of processes running in your operating system. These processes manage how data is stored and how it is accessed. I will cover these processes in detail in the future; but for now we just need to understand that Oracle is a program that is running in the background, maintaining your data for you and figuring out where it should go on your hard drive.

In almost all relational databases, data is accessed through SQL, or Structured Query Language, and Oracle is no exception. SQL allows you to SELECT your data, INSERT new records, UPDATE existing records and DELETE records you want to get rid of. SQL can be embedded in other languages or you can run scripts of SQL directly against the database.

PL/SQL is the procedural language extension to SQL. PL/SQL is a programming language like C, Java or Pascal. In the Oracle world, there is no better way to access your data from inside a program. SQL can be natively embedded in PL/SQL programs. I will be using both SQL and PL/SQL very heavily in my future articles.

PL/SQL is a feature-rich language geared toward developing database applications. PL/SQL is the procedural language of the database, but it is also the procedural language for most of Oracle's tools. Programs that run inside the database are called stored procedures. These stored procedures are almost always PL/SQL, but can be written in Java.

Goal Of learnOracle

My goal at learnOracle is to lower the barrier for entry to new database users, developers and DBAs. I believe that the database is the most critical component of any system in modern business. Data is king. For SMB businesses looking at databases, it can be intimidating and there's no reason it should. The same applies to developers. Database professionals seem to make it a point to convince people how difficult databases are and how they require some kind of special hand shake to deal with a database. I want to dispel that myth. It's not brain surgery.

This site is not meant to be a reference site. Database documentation has come along way in the last few years and I just don't think the web needs another generic syntax repository. This site is also not meant to be a FAQ or a Q&A site. Think of learnOracle as my way of sharing what I have learned over a long career. It's also, a bit at least, my way of sharing what I am still learning today.

The format of learnOracle is like a book. The site is built around essays grouped around categories, sub-categories and chapters. Categories are identified in the menu to the top of the screen. Once you've selected a category, you'll be presented with a table of sub-categories, and then when you select a particular sub-category, you will then be presented with a table of contents identifying the chapters. The idea is that you can read as much, or as little, as you like and come back later to read more.