Professional Oracle Programming is intended for application developers who use Oracle as their database. As such, this book does not devote much space to topics which are primarily of interest to database administrators, such as backup and recovery. Most importantly, this book is designed to help a programmer understand the database issues that can have a direct impact on the operation and performance of their applications.

This volume attempts to provide a foundation for these developers, as well as guidance and examples of some of the key areas of interest and necessity. These areas include accessing data using SQL, handling issues such as multi-user concurrency and data integrity and security, the basics of programming with Java, PL/SQL and XML, and data warehousing.

This book is intended for people whose primary job is to create application systems. They are developers, rather than database administrators. Following through on this profile, we believe that you, the professional developer, are well informed and skilled in the creation of these application systems. In our experience, even professional developers may think of the database they use as nothing more than a place to store data.

MySQL is the most popular SQL database in the open source community and is used almost universally by web sites running on open source systems. As powerful and flexible as it is lightweight and efficient, MySQL packs a large feature set into a very small and fast engine that now runs on more than 500,000 servers. This renowned online manual that has supported MySQL administrators and database developers for years is now available in paperback format. This book is an exact reproduction of the MySQL Reference Manual from the MySQL development team's Web site, minus some non-technical appendices. This version covers MySQL 4.0.

Many sophisticated topics appear in this comprehensive manual, ranging from the hitches you may run into when first installing MySQL to internals that will help you tune your queries. MySQL Reference Manual contains all the comprehensive reference material one would expect for building the product, running administrative utilities, and using various API as well as MySQL's rich version of SQL. In addition, you can turn a page and find such unexpected riches as:

* Organization: The book is divided into five parts: Getting Starated with MySQL and Relational Databases; Understanding SQL Through MySQL; MySQL Administration; MySQL Developer Guide; and Advanced and Specialized MySQL Topics.
* Comprehensive coverage: This Bible covers both beginning-level and advanced topics. Topics covered include: introduction to relational database management; installing and configuring MySQL on the Linux, Windows 2000, and Mac OS X operating systems; MySQL security; debugging and repairing MySQL databases and servers; MySQL performance tuning; and developing MySQL applications with Perl and PHP.
* Coverage of NuSphere MySQL: Due to the growing popularity of the Nu