Updated Oracle SQL*Plus Tutorial

Folks:
Here's yet another updated tutorial. I've been hosting an Oracle SQL*Plus tutorial for the last 16 or 17 years or so (wow that's a long time!). This was one of the very first tutorials I put on the web back in 1996 and it has been downloaded thousands of times. From my web site statistics I can see it was downloaded over 9,000 times in the last month.

Since I took a bit of a break in teaching the advanced database course, I have not kept the tutorial up to date. So this week I set about to fix that.  The main modifications I made were to include more references to the current oracle 11g Release 2 software that most folks would come across if they are going to do a new install of Oracle today.

To that end, I have included an extra page on how to download and install Oracle 11g Release 2 Express Edition. I also included some notes on using Oracle Application Express to submit SQL statements directly to the database.  Oracle Application Express is a web app. that loads up along side of the database. It provides a basic web server that serves up different screens that let you build web applications and work directly with the database.  This makes it very easy to get started doing interesting things with the Oracle database.

The good news is that virtually all of the SQL statements that I provide in my SQL tutorial work just fine under even the most recent version of the database.

The other MAJOR update I did was to the actual data examples used in the tutorial. The original tutorial was based on a data set from a well known textbook. The data set used birth dates and social security numbers for employees, managers, etc.  I've replaced all references to social security number to employeeid. This is to encourage better practice of not using ssn at all if you can avoid it.  The employees were starting to look a little old so I updated the birth dates by a few decades.

I am still working on some touch-ups but I think the bulk of the material is ready for consumption.

Here is the link to the tutorials: http://www.holowczak.com/tutorials.html#oracletutorials

As always please send me any comments and feedback you may have.

Cheers,

Rich H.