"Dear Reader, I have a simple philosophy when it comes to the Oracle database: you can treat it as a black box and just stick data into it, or you can understand how it works and exploit it fully. If you choose the former, you will, at best, waste money and miss the potential of your IT environment. At worst, you will create non-scalable and incorrectly implemented applications-ones that damage your data integrity and, in short, give incorrect information. If you choose to understand exactly how the Oracle database platform should be used, then you will find that there are few information management problems that you cannot solve quickly and elegantly. I wrote this book for people who choose the latter route. I"ve selected what I consider to be the most important Oracle features and techniques, and I teach them in a proof-by-example manner, explaining not only what the feature is, but also how it works, how to implement software using it, and the common pitfalls associated...