| Oracle Database 11g is the newest release of Oracle’s flagship database product. It contains a number of new innovations, which we cover in the pages of this book. This is my third Oracle “New Features” book for Oracle Press, and I’ve actually been writing them since Oracle 8.0 was released. For each book, it’s been an incredible experience to go through the product, find the new features, and learn how to use them.
It can be difficult to write books about new features. First, you don’t start out running the production product. You write using a beta copy of the software, and just hope that the final release does not change too much. Also, the marketing reality is that publishers want to get books out to market. So there is always this battle between quality and delivery. In fact, the folks at Oracle Press/McGraw Hill are terrific about this, and understand the battle. In this book we have cut no corners. We wrote initially on the beta, and after the production code came out we went over the chapters with the production code looking for any changes.
The first new features book I wrote (in fact, my first book) was for upgrading from Oracle 7.3 to Oracle 8. This first book was written with the upgrade exam in mind. The book was written after Oracle 8 was released, so I had documentation at hand. The first book written from beta code was Oracle9i New Features. The 9i Beta was difficult. The documentation was not complete, and it was difficult to discover any information on the new feature sets that were being released. Oracle Database 10g was easier. The beta was a much easier process and documentation was more plentiful. |