OCP

Oracle® Database 11g

Administrator Certified

Professional

Study Guide

Dear Reader,

Thank you for choosing OCP: Oracle Database 11g Administrator Certified Professional Study Guide. This book is part of a family of premium-quality Sybex books, all of which are written by outstanding authors who combine practical experience with a gift for teaching.

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I hope you see all that reflected in these pages. I’d be very interested to hear your comments and get your feedback on how we’re doing. Feel free to let me know what you think about this or any other Sybex book by sending me an email at nedde@wiley.com, or if you think you’ve found a technical error in this book, please visit http://sybex.custhelp.com. Customer feedback is critical to our efforts at Sybex.

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Vice President and Publisher

Sybex, an Imprint of Wiley

This book is dedicated to my wife, Lisa; my children; and my father. —Robert G. Freeman

For my wife, Donna, and our daughter, Jenny. —Charles A. Pack

Acknowledgments

Writing a book is such a vast undertaking that it’s hard to know where to start with the acknowledgments. I also hate writing this part because, frankly, someone always gets forgotten. That being said, here we go.

Thanks to my patient wife, Lisa, who sits across from me in our office and typically gets as little sleep as I do. Thanks to my kids who are still managing to grow up into wonderful adults in spite of this crazy world. Thanks to all my great friends at work who support me, who uplift me (imagine working at a job where you can start a meeting with a prayer!), and who are some very smart people. In particular, thanks to David Wright, Bill Johnson, Heber Allen, Jed Brunson, Dan Dredge, and Mandy Cosper. Additional thanks to Dave Prestwich, Mike Bowers, Stephen Shaffer, Brent Moody, and John Harper. Thanks also to my Core team guys Scott Black, Dennis Carlson, Ryan Allen, and Randy Knight. Also thanks to my way cool DBE team members Curt Workman, Bill Francis, Mike Noble, Ben Beishline, and Matthew Newman. You are all awesome. Thanks also to the rest of the EIM team at the church; you are awesome but too numerous to mention in the space I have here. I’ve worked with more awesome people that I can list in these pages. If I could list all your names here, I would. As it is, just know that I appreciate you and loved working with you over the years.

Writing books is a long, complex, and often frustrating task. Thanks to all the folks at Sybex that participated in the making of this book. Thanks to Jeff Kellum, who was my acquisitions editor, for getting me involved in this project. I’d worked with Jeff before on my very first book, and apparently he didn’t remember the pain I caused him well enough, since he asked me to write this book anyway. Thanks to Kim Wimpsett for awesome editing and being the best development editor ever! Thanks to Christine O’Connor for doing a bang-up job with the book and to Judy Flynn, copy editor extraordinaire, the proofreader Candace English, and to Nancy Guenther, indexer.

Finally, a very important thanks goes out to YOU. Thanks for buying this book. Thanks for wanting to become an Oracle Certified Professional. Thanks for any nice comments you might leave on websites here and there. Thanks for trusting us to help you succeed at the test!

—Robert G. Freeman

Thanks to Robert Freeman and Jeff Kellum for the opportunity to write this book. Thanks to David May, Gary Baird, and Greg Sinclair for providing a rock-solid infrastructure, not only in which to practice my art but also to the great benefit of my employer, CSX. Thanks to my capacity management team Chris Roessler, Harry Price, Brian Horan, Jan Shane, Joe Zuleger, and Derryck Zimmerman; my storage team Andy Brackett, Scott Gunter, Joe Fredrickson, Mike Able, John Anderson, Chris Griffith, Rick Ferry, Gene Pate, and Jim Gouvernante. To my coworkers Benny Kronz, Maritza Gonzalez, Chris Wilson, John Kall, Sandra Merwin, Duard Williams, Rich McClain, and Frank Lamon, for building a world-class Oracle database environment at CSX and for making it possible for me to continuously learn, develop, and teach.

viii  Acknowledgments

This book would not have been written without my wife’s permission, of course. Thank you, Donna, for being by my side through these projects, especially during the summer months in Florida. Thank you to my daughter, Jenny, who is 7 and sitting next to me on the sofa writing stories on her MacBook about Chihuahuas and leopard geckos while I write about “the Oracle.”

—Charles A. Pack

About the Authors

Robert G. Freeman lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, and is a principle database engineer with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Robert has been working with Oracle for some 20 years now. After the latest economic explosion, Robert expects that he will continue to be working for at least another 20 years. He has shelved his pending midlife career-change plans to become a maniacal recluse living in a cabin out in the middle of nowhere due to the economic crisis and current state of his 401(k).

Besides working with Oracle databases (that’s his story and he’s sticking to it), Robert writes an occasional book (at last count 12 or so), flies airplanes, enjoys karate, and has a family that is awesome. He met Charles Pack, who is a fellow Okie (even if he sometimes roots for the wrong school) years ago and to this day wonders if Charles will ever walk around without wearing sunglasses to hide his eyes and the deep meaning contained in them. Robert is the husband of the patient Lisa and father of five wonderful, if not occasionally misguided, children.

If you liked this book and want to email Robert, you can do so at dbaoracle@aol.com. If you didn’t like this book, then make sure you remember that Charles A. Pack wrote it and email him instead.

Charles A. Pack is an Oracle Certified Professional DBA with over 20 years of IT experience. His career has included the roles of PC repairman, network administrator, systems operator, COBOL programmer, backup and storage engineer, DBA, architect, project manager, and people manager. He earned the Bachelor of Science degree from Oklahoma State University, the MBA from the University of Oklahoma, and the Master of Science in Computer Science from Texas A&M University – Corpus Christi. He has taught Oracle DBA classes at Florida Community College Jacksonville and has presented on the subject at universities and to professional organizations. He authored the Oracle Press Oracle9i Database: OCP 9i Performance Tuning Exam Guide and collaborated with coauthor Robert Freeman on the Oracle 8 to 8i Upgrade Exam Cram. In his current role as technical director of hardware provisioning at CSX Technology in Jacksonville, Florida, he and his teams are responsible for enterprise storage, backups, capacity planning, and performance. He is a true Cowboy at heart, and he loves to barbecue.

Contents at a Glance