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Hi all,

I have been a sys admin for a while now, going on 8 years. I support
systems with various versions of Oracle running on Solaris. I have
always threatend to actually learn something about Oracle and I am
finally beggining that journey.

And it sure is humbling!

I have a couple books here, one of them is a Study Guide for Oracle 8i
and one is O'Reillys "Oracle SQL*Plus".

While both have a lot of information, I am having a hard time even
getting started...think I need an "Oracle for Dummies" or something. A
coworker set up a database for me that I believe is fairly simple, it
loads in data from a text file that is recording disk space usage over
multiple systems for trending purposes. I have full access to this
database, i.e. I can connect to it and see a shiny SQL> prompt but I
am at a loss as to where to go from here.

Are there any decent resources that can get me going in the right
direction? Out of these two books I have, they cover a lot of high end
stuff but a lot of it seems to assume that I already know what I am
doing; but I dont! For now I would be happy to see what sort of
tables exist in this database, what they are called, i.e. but all of
the examples I find assume I already know that. One example I found is
the "describe" command. Looks handy at first, but the examples in the
book say to do something like this:

DESCRIBE <argument>

How can I find out what <argument> possibilities are? Is there some
sort of overview command that will help me fill in the blanks here?

TIA,

tonij67@hotmail.com wrote in
news:1136580445.827266.192730@g43g2000cwa.googlegr oups.com:

> Hi all,
>
> I have been a sys admin for a while now, going on 8 years. I support
> systems with various versions of Oracle running on Solaris. I have
> always threatend to actually learn something about Oracle and I am
> finally beggining that journey.
>
> And it sure is humbling!
>
> I have a couple books here, one of them is a Study Guide for Oracle 8i
> and one is O'Reillys "Oracle SQL*Plus".
>
> While both have a lot of information, I am having a hard time even
> getting started...think I need an "Oracle for Dummies" or something. A
> coworker set up a database for me that I believe is fairly simple, it
> loads in data from a text file that is recording disk space usage over
> multiple systems for trending purposes. I have full access to this
> database, i.e. I can connect to it and see a shiny SQL> prompt but I
> am at a loss as to where to go from here.
>
> Are there any decent resources that can get me going in the right
> direction? Out of these two books I have, they cover a lot of high end
> stuff but a lot of it seems to assume that I already know what I am
> doing; but I dont! For now I would be happy to see what sort of
> tables exist in this database, what they are called, i.e. but all of
> the examples I find assume I already know that. One example I found is
> the "describe" command. Looks handy at first, but the examples in the
> book say to do something like this:
>
> DESCRIBE <argument>
>
> How can I find out what <argument> possibilities are? Is there some
> sort of overview command that will help me fill in the blanks here?
>
> TIA,
>
>

http://tahiti.oracle.com -- contains the whole Oracle Doc. set.
Start by RTFM - Concepts manual

<tonij67@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1136580445.827266.192730@g43g2000cwa.googlegr oups.com...
> Hi all,
>
> I have been a sys admin for a while now, going on 8 years. I support
> systems with various versions of Oracle running on Solaris. I have
> always threatend to actually learn something about Oracle and I am
> finally beggining that journey.
>
> And it sure is humbling!
>
> I have a couple books here, one of them is a Study Guide for Oracle 8i
> and one is O'Reillys "Oracle SQL*Plus".
>
> While both have a lot of information, I am having a hard time even
> getting started...think I need an "Oracle for Dummies" or something. A
> coworker set up a database for me that I believe is fairly simple, it
> loads in data from a text file that is recording disk space usage over
> multiple systems for trending purposes. I have full access to this
> database, i.e. I can connect to it and see a shiny SQL> prompt but I
> am at a loss as to where to go from here.
>
> Are there any decent resources that can get me going in the right
> direction? Out of these two books I have, they cover a lot of high end
> stuff but a lot of it seems to assume that I already know what I am
> doing; but I dont! For now I would be happy to see what sort of
> tables exist in this database, what they are called, i.e. but all of
> the examples I find assume I already know that. One example I found is
> the "describe" command. Looks handy at first, but the examples in the
> book say to do something like this:
>
> DESCRIBE <argument>
>
> How can I find out what <argument> possibilities are? Is there some
> sort of overview command that will help me fill in the blanks here?
>
> TIA,
>

Hi,

Welcome to the wonderful (well, most of the time :-)) world of Oracle !

I found the following O'Reilly book very good for learning the basic
concepts :
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/oressentials3/

Of course there's also the official documentation as IANAL_VISTA already
stated, but people tend to get lost into those 50.000 pages :-)


HTH
Matthias

tonij67@hotmail.com wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I have been a sys admin for a while now, going on 8 years. I support
> systems with various versions of Oracle running on Solaris. I have
> always threatend to actually learn something about Oracle and I am
> finally beggining that journey.
>
> And it sure is humbling!
>
> I have a couple books here, one of them is a Study Guide for Oracle 8i
> and one is O'Reillys "Oracle SQL*Plus".
>
> While both have a lot of information, I am having a hard time even
> getting started...think I need an "Oracle for Dummies" or something. A
> coworker set up a database for me that I believe is fairly simple, it
> loads in data from a text file that is recording disk space usage over
> multiple systems for trending purposes. I have full access to this
> database, i.e. I can connect to it and see a shiny SQL> prompt but I
> am at a loss as to where to go from here.
>
> Are there any decent resources that can get me going in the right
> direction? Out of these two books I have, they cover a lot of high end
> stuff but a lot of it seems to assume that I already know what I am
> doing; but I dont! For now I would be happy to see what sort of
> tables exist in this database, what they are called, i.e. but all of
> the examples I find assume I already know that. One example I found is
> the "describe" command. Looks handy at first, but the examples in the
> book say to do something like this:
>
> DESCRIBE <argument>
>
> How can I find out what <argument> possibilities are? Is there some
> sort of overview command that will help me fill in the blanks here?
>
> TIA,

As previously suggested tahiti.oracle.com is the best single source for
syntax in all of its verbosity.

For working demos of the technology go to www.psoug.org and click on
Morgan's Library.

the PSOUG site also has a tab labeled RESOURCES with links to many of
the best Oracle sites on the web. I also highly recommend books by Tom
Kyte and Jonathan Lewis.
--
Daniel A. Morgan
http://www.psoug.org
damorgan@x.washington.edu
(replace x with u to respond)

<< For now I would be happy to see what sort of tables exist in this
database, what they are called, i.e. but all of the examples I find
assume I already know that. >>

You can see what tables are OWNED by the user that you logged in with
as follows:

SELECT table_name FROM user_tables;

You can also see tables that are ACCESSIBLE by the user that you logged
in with as follows:

SELECT owner, table_name FROM all_tables ORDER BY 1, 2;

If you logged in as a user with DBA privileges, then you will have
access to ALL of the tables in the database as follows:

SELECT owner, table_name FROM dba_tables ORDER BY 1, 2;

Please note that this last SELECT statement will probably generate a
LOT of output, so you probably should limit the amount of output by a
WHERE clause. For example:

SELECT table_name FROM dba_tables WHERE rownum < 50;

The objects user_tables, all_tables, and dba_tables are all from the
Oracle data dictionary. They are actually views, but that doesn't
matter much for you at this point.

There are a LOT of other views in the Oracle data dictionary. Some of
them are as follows:

user_tab_columns (lists the columns for tables)
user_views
user_synonyms
user_indexes

The user_ views give you access to objects that are OWNED by the user
that you are logged in as. For example, if you are logged in as SCOTT,
then you will only see SCOTT's objects via the user_ views.

The all_ views give you access to objects that are ACCESSIBLE by the
user that you are logged in as.

The dba_ views are only accessible by users with DBA privileges.

As mentioned before, you can replace the user_ prefix with all_ or
dba_, for example:

all_tab_columns
dba_indexes
....

With this info, you can then use DESC to get a listing of a specific
table (which you can also get via the user_tab_columns view).

Hope this helps.

<< For now I would be happy to see what sort of tables exist in this
database, what they are called, i.e. but all of the examples I find
assume I already know that. >>

You can see what tables are OWNED by the user that you logged in with
as follows:

SELECT table_name FROM user_tables;

You can also see tables that are ACCESSIBLE by the user that you logged
in with as follows:

SELECT owner, table_name FROM all_tables ORDER BY 1, 2;

If you logged in as a user with DBA privileges, then you will have
access to ALL of the tables in the database as follows:

SELECT owner, table_name FROM dba_tables ORDER BY 1, 2;

Please note that this last SELECT statement will probably generate a
LOT of output, so you probably should limit the amount of output by a
WHERE clause. For example:

SELECT table_name FROM dba_tables WHERE rownum < 50;

The objects user_tables, all_tables, and dba_tables are all from the
Oracle data dictionary. They are actually views, but that doesn't
matter much for you at this point.

There are a LOT of other views in the Oracle data dictionary. Some of
them are as follows:

user_tab_columns (lists the columns for tables)
user_views
user_synonyms
user_indexes

The user_ views give you access to objects that are OWNED by the user
that you are logged in as. For example, if you are logged in as SCOTT,
then you will only see SCOTT's objects via the user_ views.

The all_ views give you access to objects that are ACCESSIBLE by the
user that you are logged in as.

The dba_ views are only accessible by users with DBA privileges.

As mentioned before, you can replace the user_ prefix with all_ or
dba_, for example:

all_tab_columns
dba_indexes
....

With this info, you can then use DESC to get a listing of a specific
table (which you can also get via the user_tab_columns view).

Hope this helps.

Hi,
along with Tom Kyte book nad Jonathan lewis books, if you want to learn
PL/SQL programming, i recommend Oracle PL/SQL Programming by Steven
Feurestein.

Giridhar