Tom 的经验谈

Tom 是怎么成为一个 Oracle 数据库大师的?在这里有所提及：

it took me 16 years of “all about oracle” to be here. started as a programmer/analyst on the mainframe writing PL/I code against SQL/DS and DB2 (PL/I is still by far the coolest language I’ve ever used). That started my SQL career. I bought Oracle version 5.1.5c from Dr. Dobbs Journal for $99.00 in the late 80’s and started building systems with it. Then I was “forced” to use
Sybase, Informix, Ingress, Gupta SQLBase and other “rdbms’s” as well.

阅读/学习基本理论和掌握产品文档是必要的一步：

I also learned all about databases then — read the theory (like Jim Grays Transaction Processing Book, not really light reading but taught me lots of stuff). Then read the practical (the reference manuals).
So I spent six years as a developer/dba. Even though I was a coder — i found doing things in the database to make tons more sense then writing tons of code to do the same. I actually quit my first job after six years soley for the reason that they wouldn’t let me exploit the software they paid so much for (they were so into this “generic database”, the “database is a commidity”
concept that they had me coding our own two phase commit protocol, our own stored procedure language, our own compilers for the same, our own sql parser — it was frightening. Funny thing is — I meet with customers all of the time
still doing just that!)
the first six years is what really did it. on the job training, reading — tech books (egads — the manuals!) lots of magazines (i was a magazine junkie, dr dobbs, the c programmers journal, you name it).

在入行的时候也曾遇到过好的 Mentor 指点:

Oh yeah, the most important thing — i had a mentor the first 2 years, a really
great guy. taught me the important stuff. how to write good code. how to do things right. how to do things “simply”. how to not over engineer. how to think through things. i wouldn’t be doing what I do without his jump start i don’t think. (thats my biggest hint — find a mature, grounded, experienced person and latch onto them for a while. many times they really dig having a
“protege” and you definitely benefit from it)

That is when I came to Oracle in 1993. (purely by accident, I didn’t really intend coming to Oracle at all – i had another job lined up that I never showed up for as Oracle made me an offer instead)

回顾开始回答问题，以及在新闻组上的成长

I really got started in October of 1994 when I responded to my first usenet posting ever:
http://www.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&selm=383oai%24e57%40dcsun4.us.oracle.com

great way to get started — if you can answer the questions — if you know the questions, thats what it is all about.

关于数据库理论的图书：

Transaction Processing by Jim Gray, Andreas Reuter