Oracle Core: Essential Internals for DBAs and Developers
Copyright 2011 by Jonathan Lewis
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Contents at a Glance
Contents
About the Author
Jonathan Lewis is a qualified teacher with a mathematics degree from Oxford University. Although his interest in computers came to light at the tender age of about 12in the days when high-technology meant you used a keyboard, rather than a knitting needle to punch holes in cardsit wasn't until he was four years out of university that he moved into computing professionally. Apart from an initial year as an incompetent salesman (apparently the correct answer to any question is Yes, not Yes, but it's going to take several weeks of configuration and programming), he has been self-employed his entire career in the computer industry.
Jonathan's initiation into Oracle was on version 5.1 running on a PC, which he used to design and build a risk-management system for the crude-trading floor of one of the major oil companies. (He had written the first version of the system using a PC program called dBase IIIwhich did use tables and indexes and made some claims to being a relational database management system.) With Oracle, he found out what a proper relational database management system ought to be able to do, and was immediately hooked.
Since that day of revelation, Jonathan has focused exclusively on the use and abuse of the Oracle RDBMS. After three or four years of contract work helping to build large systems, he decided to move from the contractor market to the consultant market, and now shares his time evenly between short-term consultancy work, holding seminars, and research.
Jonathan is well-known in the international Oracle scene, having worked in 50 different countries and a dozen US states in the course of the last 10 years. He is a strong supporter of user groupsparticularly the UK user group (www.ukoug.org
), of courseand whenever the opportunity arises, he tries to find time for speaking to user groups outside the United Kingdom, sometimes as short, evening events at the end of a day's consultancy work. He also has a blog about Oracle (http://jonathanlewis.wordpress.com
) and contributes regularly (when he's not fully occupied writing books) to various magazines, forums and discussion groups.
Jonathan just celebrated his silver wedding anniversary to Diana (currently a primary school teacher and head of mathematics after many years of being an accountant). They have two children: Anna (now in her final year at Oxford University) and Simon (in his first year at York University). Despite the numerical backgrounds and mathematical skills of their parents, neither of the younger generation is the slightest bit interested in a career in computing.