The inspiration for the material contained in this book comes from my experiences developing Oracle software, and from working with fellow Oracle developers and helping them build reliable and robust applications based on the Oracle database. The book is basically a reflection of what I do every day and of the issues I see people encountering each and every day.

I covered what I felt was most relevant, namely the Oracle database and its architecture. I could have written a similarly titled book explaining how to develop an application using a specific language and architecture—for example, one using JavaServer Pages that speaks to
Enterprise JavaBeans, which in turn uses JDBC to communicate with Oracle. However, at the end of the day, you really do need to understand the topics covered in this book in order to build such an application successfully. This book deals with what I believe needs to be universally known to develop successfully with Oracle, whether you are a Visual Basic programmer using ODBC, a Java programmer using EJBs and JDBC, or a Perl programmer using DBI Perl.

This book does not promote any specific application architecture; it does not compare threetier to client/server. Rather, it covers what the database can do and what you must understand about the way it works. Since the database is at the heart of any application architecture, the book should have a broad audience.

In writing this book, I completely revised an updated the architecture sections from Expert One-on-One Oracle and added substantial new material. There have been three database releases since Oracle 8.1.7, the release upon which the original book was based: two Oracle9i releases and Oracle Database 10g Release 1, which is the current production release of Oracle at the time of this writing. As such, there was a lot of new functionality and many new features to cover.