Howard Rogers’ Oracle FAQ

Dizwell Informatics has put together an Oracle FAQ written by Howard Rogers that addresses some common questions around the Oracle database. It's divided into four sections (basic and expert administration, together with backup/recovery and performance tuning, with questions and answers being added as time goes by. Having had a brief look through, some Q&A's that look useful include:

• What use is the spfile?  Why was it invented in 9i and should I use one? How do I know if I am using one?
• Is there an Oracle equivalent for the Autonumber fields you can get in Access or SQL Server?
• How can I tell if a particular index is useful or not?
• Is it possible to rename a column in a table?
• Do you have a Windows batch file that will do a hot backup?
• What is the Index Clustering Factor?

Howard's also put together a comprehensive set of instructions for installing Oracle on a number of Linux distributions, including 10g on all distros, and 9i on Red Hat 9, Red Hat Adv Srv 2.1, Red Hat Adv Srv 3, Fedora Core 1, Mandrake 9.1, and SuSE 7.3.