I dedicate this book to my entire family for their so much love, affection, and constant encouragement.

A child is just like a plain canvas. It's his parents who fill colors into it with their love, blessings, guidance, and teachings. The same is true for me as well. This book is a result of the blessings, love, affection, guidance, and support of my mom and dad. Thank you so very much mom and dad! Dad, how so I wish that you were here today, but I know you are watching over me from the heavens, your blessings are always with me and you must be very happy today! We all miss you so very much—every day, in every moment!

Writing a book is a team effort and requires a lot of hard work but every journey starts from that very first step. For me, getting aboard to work on this book became possible only because of my dear friend and co-author Francisco Munoz Alvarez, who invited me to become a co-author with him. It was a really great team effort and working with him was an absolute delight, as well as a very learning and rewarding experience. I thank him for not only making me a part of this project but also for his support, help and mentoring the entire time while we were working on this project.

Though a book is written by its authors, there are many other people who work behind the scenes and do tons of things that finally result in letting a book see the sunshine. The most important among these are the technical reviewers who do the painful job of reading the raw writing of an author, line by line and correct it. It's due to their corrections, suggestions, feedback, and questions that convert those sentences written in a Word document into the chapters of an actual book. I am so very thankful to our most excellent team of the technical reviewers which we got: Arup Nanda, Wissem EL Khlifi, Gokhan Atil, Bjorn Naessens, Laurent Schneider, and Alessandro Parisi. Without their input, feedback and corrections, it wouldn't have been possible to find out what was missing, what needed to be removed, which topics required more explanation, and above all, to spot the technical errors and correct them. So when you would be reading about a topic in any chapter and would like it, remember that a major contribution to it has come in some way or the other from the technical excellence and input given by the reviewers.

I also want to say a big thanks to the entire team at Packt who did a splendid job in every aspect of the book, especially to my editor Vinay Argekar, and Wendell Palmer, the coordinator for the entire project, for being so supportive in this entire journey. Thanks to our Lead Technical Editor Azharuddin Sheikh along with his entire team: Manan Badani, Aparna Chand, and Vivek Pillai. They all have spent a lot of time ironing out the final wrinkles from the chapters, giving them that marvellous polished look which you will see throughout. I also want to pass on my gratitude to all those people with whom I might have not interacted directly but who worked very hard behind the scenes to bring this book into your hands.

I would like to take this opportunity to say thanks to all those people in the Oracle community who were not involved in this project but who are always an inspiration and constantly motivated me—not only to correct and improve myself by learning as much as possible, but also to share that learning with others and help them. The list is far too long and I am going to miss more than I will be able to put here but still, to name a few (and in no particular order): Jonathan Lewis, Hans Forbrich, Dan Morgan, Hemant Chitale, Sam Alapati, Eddie Awad, Uwe Hesse, Syed Jaffar Hussain, Kellyn Pot'Vin, Tim Gorman, Steve Adams, Kyle Hailey, Tim Hall, Mark Bobak, Cary Millsap, Howard Rodgers, Steve Karam, Tanel Poder, Alex Gorbachev, Kai Yu, Riaz Shamsudeen, Murali Vallath, Gaja Krishna Vaidyanatha, Rama Velpuri, and so many more as the list goes on and on and on. Many thanks to all of you!

Thanks to my friend Kamran Agayev for giving me the very first writing opportunity by inviting me to be his co-author and Don Burelson, and entire team of Rampant Press for their support in the entire time of writing it. Thanks to Zahida Praveen who gave me the first opportunity to step in and prove myself in the real world. I also wish to express my gratitude and thanks to all my superordinates for their constant support and motivation: Arvind Dikshit, Gautham Malareddy, Usha George, Joann Too, Ajai Sahni, Shantnu Tandan, Latha Gangadharan, Kalyan Chakravarthy, and Ritesh Jain. I would like to offer my gratitude to all the delegates that I get to meet in person and to those whom I interact with virtually over the OTN forums, for asking their questions and doubts. It's your questions which make me learn (and many times, even re-learn) new things every single day.

Finally, thanks a ton to you for making this book a part of your library. I really hope and wish that you are going to like the book and it's going to be useful for you in some way.