This book focuses on two objectives: first, to prepare you for the Oracle Database 11g: Administration I exam, number 1Z0-052, and second, to present the knowledge needed for the exam in such a way that you can use it in a real-world setting. To that end, rather than using the default tables included in Oracle, we will be working with simulated real-world data. The database we will use throughout this book is for the fictional company Companylink. Although most people are aware of the impact of social networking in our private lives, companies are realizing the importance of using it in their industries as well. Our fictional Companylink is a business that focuses on social networking in the corporate setting. The data model that we will use is a small but realistic set of working data that could support a social networking website. The following tables are included in the Companylink database, which can be downloaded from the support site at http://www.packtpub.com/support.
Employee: Information about employees that use the Companylink site.Address: Information about the street address, city, and state of each employee.Branch: The corporate branch to which each employee belongs. Each employee belongs to one branch.Division: The corporate division to which each branch belongs. Each division is associated with multiple branches.E-mail: An employee can store multiple e-mail addresses.Message: The fictional Companylink social networking site allows you to send messages to fellow employees. That information is stored here.Website: Companylink allows users to create their own personal web pages. The URL of these pages are contained in this table.Blog: In addition to a website, users can optionally create their own blogs. This information is stored in theBlogtable.Project: Each employee is assigned to a single primary project, which is contained here.Award: Employees can win corporate awards. The list of possible awards is stored here. Employees can win more than one award.Employee_award: This table is used to relate employees with their awards. Since multiple employees can win the same award and multiple awards can be won by the same employee, this creates a many-to-many table relationship, which, in the relational paradigm, must be avoided. TheEmployee_awardtable divides this many-to-many relationship into two distinct one-to-many relationships.
Once we've installed the Oracle software and created our database, these tables will form the backbone of the data that we'll use as examples throughout this book.
Tip
Downloading the example code
You can download the example code files for all Packt books you have purchased from your account at http://www.packtpub.com. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit http://www.packtpub.com/support and register to have the files e-mailed directly to you.