Oracle PL/SQL for DBAs [NOOK Book]

VERY VERY HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!

Are you a developer or database administrator? If you are, then this book is for you! Authors Arup Nanda and Steven Feuerstein, have done an outstanding job of writing a book that allows you to take advantage of the PL/SQL-based functionality in the Oracle database that is the most critical for DBAs. Nanda and Steven Feuerstein, begin by providing a whirlwind tour of the PL/SQL language, touching on all of the topics DBAs will need to become familiar with--from the basics of the PL/SQL block structure, identifier construction, and program data declarations, to the use of control and error-handling statements, to the construction of procedures, functions, packages, and triggers in PL/SQL. Then, the authors describe PL/SQL cursors and how you can improve database performance by taking advantage of such features as cursor reuse, cursor soft-parsing and soft-closing, and various characteristics of implicit cursors. Next, they explore the use of functions that can be used as data sources for queries and that are used frequently in Extraction, Transformation, and Loading (ETL) operations. The authors then explain how you can use Oracle¿s tools to build basic encryption and key management systems to protect sensitive data. They continue to explain how you can define policies on database tables so that you can restrict which rows particular users can see or change in those tables. Then, the authors show you how you can extend traditional Oracle auditing to capture both database changes and queries. Next, they discuss situations in which you may need to generate values. Finally, they describe the use of the DBMS_SCHEDULER package in scheduling jobs to be performed at regular intervals. This most excellent book is here to help you get your job done. More importantly, this book is focused squarely on the language topics of special concern to DBAs.