[techtalk] ? re Oracle/SQLPlus

[Sean McAfee]

"Becky L. Norum" <bnorum at coe.neu.edu> wrote:
>I'm trying to teach myself something about Oracle for school.  I've
>started working with the book Oracle8 Programming: A Primer by
>Sunderraman, which seems prety descriptive and good.  However, I'm having
>a couple of problems/questions that I just cannot seem to find answers for
>anywhere:

>- how does one show the primary and foreign keys and the referential
>constraints for tables?

You can query the table USER_CONSTRAINTS to get this information, for
example:

SELECT constraint_name, constraint_type
FROM user_constraints
WHERE table_name = 'mytable';

Yeah, it's pretty tedious.  I keep meaning to write an Oracle client in
Perl that would simplify operations like this, but I just haven't gotten
around to it yet.

>- is there any very BASIC resource that you could recommend that would
>serve as a primer for the structure/organization of Oracle on a UNIX
>system?  Most of the guides out there seem to be for professional DBAs/ppl
>who have prior database administration experience, which I do not have
>(MSAccess is the extent of my database experience - I have to use it for
>work.)

Just about the only Oracle reference I've ever needed is "Oracle8: The
Complete Reference" (and similarly-titled books for earlier versions of
Oracle), published by Oracle Press.  It's got a large glossary covering
every Oracle command and SQL term, and the chapters cover RDBMS and Oracle
concepts using simple examples.  I highly recommend it.  However, be aware
that it covers very little in the way of Oracle administration, so it's
probably not an appropriate book if that's what you're after.

-- 
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