This course is designed for professionals who want to become certified Oracle database administrators. Managing an Oracle database requires a broad range of technical knowledge. In order to take this course, you need to be very comfortable working in your current operating environment. Specifically, you should:

1. Be comfortable installing and configuring software.
2. Know your operating system reasonably well. You must be comfortable navigating to different directories, editing text files, copying files, running programs, and so forth.
3. Have access to a text editor, such as NotePad or vi.
4. Preferably have access to an Oracle8 or Oracle8i database, so you can follow along with the examples and create the course project. You can still take the course if you do not have access to Oracle8; you'll just have to skip the hands-on exercises.
5. Have access to basic Oracle administrative tools, such as Structured Query Language (SQL)*Plus and Oracle Enterprise Manager. Once again, without access to these tools you can still take the course, but you will not be able to completely finish the hands-on exercises.
6. Have a basic understanding of relational databases and how they are used.
7. Be reasonably familiar with SQL. You do not need to be an expert, but you should be able to understand and write simple SELECT statements. You need to understand what it means to join two tables, and know how to do that.
8. Be comfortable using command-line utilities rather than using only a graphical user interface (GUI).

You can run your Oracle database on UNIX and Windows 2000 platforms;
you can also run it on Linux, if you prefer.
Any examples specific to an operating system, and there are not many, will be provided in both Windows NT and UNIX versions. If you are taking this course using some other operating system, you will need to be comfortable translating a UNIX or Windows NT example into the appropriate commands for that system.

In earlier courses in this curriculum, you created a database, called COIN, to hold the examples for this course. You also created a user within that database. This course will make use of these entities in our examples.

You do not have to use the database and user name given for your hands-on examples, but the course will refer to these entities throughout the instructions. Simply replace this database and user name with ones of your own choosing.