This new edition distills a vast amount of knowledge into an easy-to-read volume covering the full range of Oracle's features and technologies. The book includes an overview of Oracle 10g, along with recent releases 9i and 8i. Oracle Essentials 3rd Edition: Oracle Database 10g provides everything you'll need to install and run the Oracle databases. If you're new to Oracle or upgrading to Oracle 10g, you'll find this comprehensive guide essential.

The Oracle database is a product that is both rich and deep. To address the complexities and variations in this product, Oracle books and documentation tend to be long and somewhat intimidating. Most of them either cover a broad scope of functionality in a fairly cursory way or delve deeply into complex and rather narrow topics, sometimes missing the forest for the trees by concentrating on the multitude of details of a particular subject. This book aims to be different. We want to give you an in-depth explanation of the forest itself—the concepts and features of the Oracle database. With this information, you should be better prepared to tackle any particular tree in that forest, with any number of other books.

As Oracle professionals (all of whom have worked for Oracle Corporation), we've found that a lot of Oracle users need brief explanations of similar topics. For some time, we'd wanted a book that describes all the underlying principles that shape the Oracle database, written concisely for an intelligent audience. We found that the explanations were scattered among many manuals and books and were often too complex or too simplistic. After a good deal of complaining, we finally decided to write the book ourselves. As this is now the Third Edition of Oracle Essentials, we've concluded that a number of you were looking for the same thing!