Sysadmin trying to learn Oracle...help!

Hi all,

I have been a sys admin for a while now, going on 8 years. I support systems with various versions of Oracle running on Solaris. I have always threatend to actually learn something about Oracle and I am finally beggining that journey.

And it sure is humbling!

I have a couple books here, one of them is a Study Guide for Oracle 8i and one is O'Reillys "Oracle SQL*Plus".

While both have a lot of information, I am having a hard time even getting started...think I need an "Oracle for Dummies" or something. A coworker set up a database for me that I believe is fairly simple, it loads in data from a text file that is recording disk space usage over multiple systems for trending purposes. I have full access to this database, i.e. I can connect to it and see a shiny SQL> prompt but I am at a loss as to where to go from here.

Are there any decent resources that can get me going in the right direction? Out of these two books I have, they cover a lot of high end stuff but a lot of it seems to assume that I already know what I am doing; but I dont! For now I would be happy to see what sort of tables exist in this database, what they are called, i.e. but all of the examples I find assume I already know that. One example I found is the "describe" command. Looks handy at first, but the examples in the book say to do something like this:

DESCRIBE <argument>

How can I find out what <argument> possibilities are? Is there some sort of overview command that will help me fill in the blanks here?

TIA, Received on Fri Jan 06 2006 - 14:47:25 CST