This is a defining book on the Oracle database for any developer or database administrator who works with Oracle-driven database applications. 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, then you will find that there are few information management problems that you cannot solve quickly and elegantly.

Expert Oracle Database Architecture is the first of a three-book series that completely explores and defines the Oracle database. It covers all of the most important Oracle architecture features, including:

• Files, memory structures and processes
• Locking and latching
• Transactions, concurrency and multi-versioning
• Tables and Indexes
• Datatypes
• Partitioning and parallelism

Each feature is taught in a proof-by-example manner, not only discussing what it is, but also how it works, how to implement software using it, and the common pitfalls associated with it.

This fully revised edition covers both the 9i and 10g versions. It also comes with a CD containing a searchable PDF of the 8i version of the book.

Tom has fully revised and expanded the architecture-related sections from Expert One-on-One Oracle (a searchable PDF of which is included on the CD accompanying this book), and added substantial new material. He focuses solely on 9i and 10g architecture in this book and refers to the CD for 8i-specific details. The number of changes will surprise you.

In summary, this book provides a one-stop resource containing deep wisdom on the design, development and administration of Oracle applications, written by one of the world's foremost Oracle experts, Thomas Kyte.