Oracle Database 12c PL/SQL Programming
Michael McLaughlin
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To Lisa, my eternal companion, inspiration, wife, and best friend; and to Sarah, Joseph, Elise, Ian, Ariel, Callie, Nathan, Spencer, and Christianneour terrific, heaven-sent children. Thank you for your constant support, patience, and sacrifice that made writing yet another book possible.
About the Author
Michael McLaughlin is a professor at BYUIdaho in the Computer Information Technology Department of the Business and Communication College. He is also the founder of McLaughlin Software, LLC, and is active in the Utah Oracle Users Group. He is the author of eight other Oracle Press books, such as Oracle Database 11g & MySQL 5.6 Developer Handbook, Oracle Database 11g PL/SQL Programming, and Oracle Database 11g PL/SQL Workbook.
Michael has been writing PL/SQL since it was an add-on product for Oracle 6. He also writes C, C++, Java, Perl, PHP, and Python.
Michael worked at Oracle Corporation for over eight years in consulting, development, and support. While at Oracle, he led the release engineering efforts for the direct path CRM upgrade of Oracle Applications 11i (11.5.8 and 11.5.9) and led PL/SQL forward compatibility testing for Oracle Applications 11i with Oracle Database 9i. He is the inventor of the ATOMS transaction architecture (U.S. Patents #7,206,805 and #7,290,056). The patents are assigned to Oracle Corporation.
Prior to his tenure at Oracle Corporation, Michael worked as an Oracle developer, systems and business analyst, and DBA beginning with Oracle 6. His blog is at http://blog.mclaughlinsoftware.com.
Michael lives in eastern Idaho within a two-hour drive to Caribou-Targhee National Forest, Grand Teton National Park, and Yellowstone National Park. He enjoys outdoor activities with his wife and children (six of nine of whom still live at home).
About the Contributing Author
John Harper currently works for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a principal database engineer. He greatly enjoys working with the data warehousing, business intelligence, and database engineers there.
Johns mentors include Michael McLaughlin, Robert Freeman, Danette McGilvary, and many others who have spent considerable time becoming the experts in their industry. He is both awed and inspired by their abilities and feels lucky to be associated with them.
Recently, John has had the opportunity to work closely with some of the top-notch minds in database security. He hopes to produce a series of publications focused on Oracle products such as Oracle Audit Vault and Database Firewall, and Oracle Data Redaction.
John enjoys Japanese martial arts. During his teenage years and early adulthood, he took jujitsu, karate, judo, and aikido. He loves aikido and hopes to teach it one day. He would also love to learn kyudo if he can find any spare time.
John lives with his wife of over 23 years in Northern Utah County, Utah. They have one adopted daughter, whom they cherish and thoroughly spoil. He has been working with databases for the past 14 years, specializing in Oracle administration, database architecture, database programming, database security, and information quality.