Below you will find links to resources covering the following topics:
A well-organized Oracle portal called Oracle FAQ features extensive links to many useful Oracle related sites. This is a great site for further research on Oracle topics.
You can search through the following newsgroups with the Google search engine: http://groups.google.com/. Often the answer to your question may already be out there. Be sure to check it out.
Oracle's home page is located at http://www.oracle.com. The Oracle Technology Network (OTN) offers free product downloads, discussion forums, white papers, sample code, documentation, and technical articles on a variety of Oracle related issues. The site requires registration, but is free. Oracle Support via Oracle Metalink is available only if you purchase an Oracle support contract.
This book uses SQL*Plus and iSQL*Plus as execution environments because one of these tools is always available with every Oracle installation. There are many excellent tools on the market that make you wonder how you could have ever lived without them. These tools often feature an easy-to-use editor and a graphical execution environment with a browser showing all the database objects. You can easily execute queries, generate execution plans for SQL statements, export and import tables, and reverse-engineer the DDL for existing objects. We recommend that you download one of the trial versions to help you determine the suitability for you individual needs. Following is a list of popular vendors. The ORAFAQ Web site lists many more including a comparison chart.
Besides Oracle's own Designer tool, there are a many vendors that offer tools that allow you to create logical and physical data models for Oracle databases. Following are a few of the popular vendors.
Joining a user group is one of the best ways to gain knowledge and experience using Oracle. You can search for user groups at International Oracle User Group or Oracle's Web site for a listing of all user groups. Another active national user group is the Oracle Development Tools User Group.
Jerry Flatto's mailing list and repository related to using Oracle in an academic teaching environment. Oracle's own academia related Web sites are Oracle Academic Initiative (OAI) and Oracle Workforce.
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