The Journey Begins

This is my new blog. The other one is called Aharoni in Unicode, ya mama and is more of a personal diary with some thoughts about life, music, speech, my country (Israel), the world etc.

This blog documents my self-study of the Oracle Database. Why am i studying it? Because i am working as a so-called "IT Professional", and specialize in OpenVMS and, to a lesser degree, Unix and Microsoft Windows operating systems and i want to expand my horizons to include database administration.

I picked the latest version, 10g. My friend Har'el, a DBA at my workplace told me that i should go for version 9i instead of the brand new 10g, but i am stubborn and i want to be on the edge. Sorry, Har'el.

I received some SQL training in the past, but never did any actual work with it, so i'm starting almost from scratch.

Where am i starting? My home machine is a three years old AMD Athlon 1700 with 512MB RAM and windows XP with all updates from Microsoft, including Service Pack 2. I plan to install Linux sometime soon and try DBA'ing there too.

What have i done till now:

1. Downloaded 10g from www.oracle.com. Apparently it's free for personal use. Yea, the complete enterprise version. It's about 600MB large.
2. Unzipped and installed. It's very easy. I pointed my "database root" to C:\oracle (a day will come and i'll understand what exactly "database root" means) and except that i just clicked Next Next ... Exit. Windows Firewall asked a few times if the process "java" can connect to the internet. I presumed that it is related to the installation and allowed the connection, although Oracle could be nicer and warn about it.
3. Created this blog. I ran a quick check on Google, to see if there are others like it and didn't find any. In any case, i wanted my own.

My current goal is to convert an Access database that i created to document CD's i own (872KB) to Oracle. It will be complete with views, indices, constraints, online backup and maybe a web interface. And then i'll go further.

This blog will be as detailed as possible. I'll document everything -- every success, glitch, discovery, understanding, and every technical term i learn. Maybe i'll send some bug reports and suggestions to Oracle along the way.

Here's one annoyance right at the beginning: I'm looking for a simple SQL tutorial. I couldn't find one in the documentation which was installed on my machine; there are only DBA tutorials. I can't find anything on the Oracle website either -- there's a "New to Oracle" section in which there DBA tutorial for new DBA's and JDeveloper tutorial for new developers. One of the first questions in the PostgreSQL FAQ, for example, is "How can I learn SQL?". Do Oracle suppose that everyone knows SQL? I'll keep looking.

A few rules:

1. No entry is final. I will often edit entries after they are posted to fix typos, add information etc.
2. Comments of any kind are always welcome.
3. I write the word "i" in the middle of a sentence with a small letter, because i believe in equality and i don't think that i'm any better than you are. I know that it may seem annoying to Standard English purists, but i like to play with language. I don't mean to change this rule. Still, any comments on my language are welcome (English is not my mother tongue).
4. Because i want to make this blog not only technically informative, but also personal, most of the posts will have near them a banner linking to an Amazon.com page that sells a CD. It usually means that i was listening to that CD while writing the entry and that i like it and recommend it. Right now, for example, i'm listening to Bob Dylan's brilliant "Time Out of Mind". If you click on the banner, Amazon.com will give me a few pennies for my next purchase. Just wanted you to know.