Tom Kyte has a simple philosophy: you can treat Oracle as a black box and just stick data into it or you can understand how it works and exploit it as a powerful computing environment. If you choose the latter course, then you will find that there are few information management problems that you cannot solve quickly and elegantly. Tom has selected the most important features and techniques and he teaches them in a proof-by-example manner, not only discussing the features available, but also how to implement software using them and indicating the potential pitfalls. This book covers: Core database structures and utilities; Performance tuning; Advanced SQL features; Extensibility using C, Java and OR features; Security; and Important supplied packages.