Fresh Meat to the MEEP blog

Hello,

My name is Lars and I started with the MEEP Program feb. 1st. I have worked with Oracle products for more than 6 years. Turned DBA last year. In december I passed the Oracle Certified Associate exam, so now I have a peace of paper that says I can study and understand Oracle concepts. :-) So I hope this knowledge will help me through MEEP.



I started with Tom Kytes book: Expert Oracle Database Architecture: 9i and 10g Programming Techniques and Solutions

This far I have read 9 chapters, which has covered the basic architecture of databases, such as memory structures, data files, how the database ensures read and write consistency, especially how Oracle does this, locking mechanisms both in objects and Oracles own belly (latches), the different background processes, how transactions work, and the current chapter is redo and undo.



Most of this is not new to me, but the thing that is absolutely awesome about this book is the real life situation, consideration and the no-nos. Which, to me, just takes the understanding of the architecture to a different level.

F.ex. Tom writes about transactions, and how putting in a null in the exception area of a PL/SQL code completely changes the outcome of the transaction since the statement (the procedure, doesn't raise an error) I have seen this many places, and now I start to understand some of the weird errors that I saw in a previous work.


Seems I really grasped (for a newbie) the idea of how Oracle keeps read-consistency. I wrote an email to all the autistic nerds and gave my explanation of how it works internally, and I got an approval of my thought proces from the almighty M2, one of the few who is an OCM (Oracle Certified Master).