Hi,

Hopefully this isn't a brain dead question. I've been a DBA for almost
10 years, but my experience has been exclusively with MS SQL. Now I
hope to expand my knowledge and start learning Oracle, but I'm not sure
where to begin. I downloaded and installed Oracle 10g Express Edition,
but this seems to have lots of limitations. Should I run with the
downloadable version of 11g Release 1 instead?

In the Microsoft world they offer SQL Server Developer Edition which is
basically the same as Enterprise Edition but only allowing a couple of
connections for developers to learn, and I'm looking for an equivalent
to this with Oracle.

Also can someone point me to some good books or online resources that'll
help learn PL/SQL? I'm very fluent in TSQL, which is what MS SQL uses,
but I know there are plenty enough differences between the two.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions and comments.

Sam Alex

On Aug 14, 11:58*am, Sam Alexander <sama... (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote:
Not brain-dead at all, a very positive question.

The best way to unlearn all the misconceptions of T-SQL is to work
through the books by Tom Kyte. No slight towards T-SQL intended, you
just need to understand there are fundamental differences, things you
take for granted are wrong in the larger world. See the Oracle
Concepts manual at tahiti.oracle.com, especially the parts about the
consistency model and locking. Once the light bulb goes on you may
like the Oracle way better. Might take a couple years though :-)

You can download EE free unfettered from otn.oracle.com free
registration required. Read the license.

Steven Feuerstein is the acknowledged PL expert.

See http://dbaoracle.net/readme-cdos.htm#subj12

jg
--
@home.com is bogus.
http://asert.arbornetworks.com/2009/...mmand-channel/

On Fri, 2009-08-14 at 12:14 -0700, joel garry wrote:

Hi Joel,

Thanks for the great information... I had already downloaded and
installed the 10g Express edition, but I'm downloading Oracle Database
11g Release 1 (11.1.0.6.0) now, which is like 1.7 Gigs. I assume it'll
install okay on Windows XP, and I'll uninstall the 10G one.

I'll start looking through the other info you sent as well.

Thanks again and take care ---

Sam Alex

On Aug 14, 9:54*pm, Sam Alex <sama... (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote:
Oracle Express is close to be a fully functional EE version of Oracle
10gR2. It is missing only a few features such as Fine Grained
Auditing and RAC. It is PC friendly in the amount of load it puts on
a PC so if you find that your PC does not have the hourse power to run
the normal versions you want want to go back to Express.

In either above case the best place to start depends on your ultimate
goals but before reading any of Tom's very fine books I would read the
Oracle Concepts manual. It explains the basic architecture upon which
Oracle is built. The DBA Administration manual explains how to
manually or using the GUI Database Creation Assistant, DBCA, create a
database. It also covers the creation and managment of tablespaces,
tables, views, users, and basic security.

All the manuals are available online and you can get a downloadable
set from http://otn.oracle.com. The downloadable set includes both
html and pds versions of all the standard manuals: Concepts, DBA
Admin, SQL, Reference, PL/SQL, etc ....

IMHO -- Mark D Powell --