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support me. To the many friends I have made over the years, especially the JPL friends who are my Arizona family. You all have contributed to whom I have become.
Michael Mallia: First and foremost, to my soulmate, Shauna. Without her, our house would not be a home. Secondly, to my four-year-old's Godfather and his number-one birthday party invitee, MichaelAbbey (MichaelAbbey is one word!), for the dedication and love he obviously has for my family. May we know each other until I change my belt size.
Tim Quinlan: Special thanks to Helen, Ryan, and Brendan for supporting and helping me with this work.
George Trujillo: I would like to say a special thanks to my wife, Karen, and kids, Cole, Madison, and Gage, for their love and patience during all the long nights and early mornings while writing course materials.
Oracle Database 10g marks the latest release by a company that has experienced a meteoric rise to success over the past 25-plus years. They have been grossing many billions of dollars annually for many years, vending a suite of solutions powered by their flagship product—the Oracle database. It has gone through many changes in names—v6, Oracle7, Oracle8i, Oracle9i, and now Oracle 10g. Regardless of what it is called, the Oracle server has been catapulted to the forefront of our Internet-savvy society, playing a role as the primary data server on a web site in your neighborhood. This book is your introduction to the Oracle Database 10g technology. It is the start of your journey—a quick start to a complex and popular technology.
Oracle Database 10g is the culmination of thousands upon thousands of person hours building an infrastructure to deliver data to a hungry, worldwide community, just as electricity is delivered to a three-prong outlet near you. Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle Corporation, is a visionary steering Oracle's product set in directions unheard of before. You cannot read any public relations or technical material from Oracle Corporation without hearing that four letter word—grid. With grid computing, the industry envisions a computational grid where machines all the way from the Intel-based server to the high-end servers from HP, IBM, and Sun are interlaced with one another is a massively scalable and sharable environment.
There have been many advances in the processing power of computer chips over the past few decades, and grid computing is seen as allowing applications to harness that power. Idle processor time is deliberately consumed by shared applications. The analogy to the electricity grid is an interesting one. When you plug your iron into a socket in your basement, you neither know nor care where the electricity is coming from—it's just there and taken for granted. With Oracle Database 10g grid computing, transparent access is provided to a wide network of remote computers. Unbeknownst to application users, processing is shared between widely disparate sites, where the location of nodes responsible for data delivery is dynamic—hence the likeness to the
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