How I Got Started...

It all started 5 1/2 years ago, my first IT job as a reports developer. I was given a tnsnames file and SQL*Plus. What? What the hell am I supposed to do with this?

I learned about databases through Microsoft's Access. While I would never want to go back to it, I am thankful it was there or I probably would never have learned. I was basically a secretary (administrative assistant for the PC). I got tired of entering in the same thing every month and knew there had to be a better way. So I put it in Access to speed things up a bit. I began to annoy the crap out of the IT department. I now wanted raw feeds of the data so that I wouldn't have to type in anything...

Finally a friend came along and offered me a job.

That's when I met Oracle.

So there I sat on my first day wondering where the tables where. I couldn't "see" them. I needed to "see" them dammit. Within a week I had set up an Access database to be my front end to Oracle; I couldn't stand not "seeing" the tables.

That got old real quick though. The sheer volume of data caused that. Within weeks, I was using SQL*Plus and beggining to learn the data dictionary.

I'd ask my cube mate, "How do I see the source of the view?"

SELECT text FROM user_views WHERE view_name = 'MY_VIEW';

Oh yeah; SET LONG 100000

I was fortunate enough to have a helpful cube mate.

And so began my obsession...

I would say it took a good year before I really started to feel comfortable with SQL*Plus and Oracle, and 5 years later, I'm still using it.

I'm glad I was forced to learn Oracle that way. I believe that I have a far better understanding of how Oracle works because of my experience.