The goal of this book is to provide you with a single source for most of your day-to-day Oracle
database management tasks. Of course, it isn’t feasible to cover each and every DBA topic in detail.
What I’ve done in this book is focus on the topics that are common to most enterprises, such as
installing the Oracle Database 10g software, creating and upgrading databases, exporting and
importing data, backing up and recovering data, and performance tuning. I place a lot of emphasis
in this book on explaining all of Oracle’s automatic management solutions. Using Oracle’s automatic
management features will keep you from reinventing the wheel each time. It also turns out
that after several years of development, Oracle has finally placed in your hands a set of powerful
management advisors and other tools that make a lot of traditional DBA work obsolete.

The experienced Oracle DBA can find his or her way through this baffling amount of material,
but how’s the neophyte DBA to cope with the overwhelming amount of information? That’s where
this book comes in. This text will not only educate you in the theory and principles involved in
managing relational databases, it will also help you translate that theory into the useful, practical
knowledge that will enable you to manage real-life Oracle Database 10g databases with real-life
data and real-life issues.