Dave Welch (@OraVBCA), CTO and Chief Evangelist

I advocate that IT management at all levels and administrators of peer technical disciplines read the Oracle Database Concepts Guide’s Introduction chapter. Yes, that includes the C-level. That read will go a long way in preparing you to participate in database-related discussions at any level. Although this is beneficial if your organization deals with Oracle databases at all, it will prepare you to understand and accept a qualified architect’s suggestion that running Oracle business-critical workloads on the vSphere platform can provide remarkable benefits with minimal if any risks.

As I post this, it’s interesting for me to introspect on how little my mentoring activities have shifted since I authored my first version of this document. This is the centerpiece of guidance I developed and field-tested over seventeen elapsed years of Oracle DBA team building and mentoring. If you intend to become a DBA, study my selected subset of the Introduction chapter as if you were preparing to take a test on it. In 1995, one of my protégés started with the ingredient goo that evolved into this guidance table. He went on inside a year to become a successful consultant working for Oracle Corporation.

Why am I recommending a document and release version that ostensibly became obsolete years ago when Database release 10g went into mainstream adoption? Certainly not as an excuse to save time by repurposing existing collateral. I just rewrote this approach table from scratch. I find the Database Concepts Guide’s Introduction chapter got cumbered as of release 10g, and the nice self-contained introductory chapter is no longer what it used to be. I’m not saying I could have done a better job authoring the newer Concepts Guides. You can return later to more recent versions’ concepts guides to spot look up newer features as needed. But I believe the benefit of a coherent, consolidated read exceeds the risk of wasting time in older release documentation. It can be difficult to find quality vendor-provided documentation. Oracle’s documentation, at least up through 9i, is a notable exception.

The 9i Concepts Guide’s Introduction chapter is 67 pages. In the approach guidance table that follows, I’m suggesting that you read only about two thirds of that chapter. Your first read needs to be slow and careful to understand the concepts. Then return to review the concepts sufficient to suit your purposes.

The following approach table follows all the way through for DBA candidates’ needs. Non-DBA candidates will know where short of that to stop. DBA candidates should follow this overview with a study of the 2-Day DBA guide first published with Database 10g. I have my own selective approach to that document as well, which is beyond the scope of this post.

Here is your syllabus:

Oracle9i Database Concepts
Release 2 (9.2)
March 2002
http://docs.oracle.com/cd/B10501_01/server.920/a96524.pdf