Written by Oracle insiders, this indispensable guide distills an enormous amount of information about the Oracle Database into one compact volume. Ideal for novice and experienced DBAs, developers, managers, and users, Oracle Essentials walks you through technologies and features in Oracle's product line, including its architecture, data structures, networking, concurrency, and tuning. Complete with illustrations and helpful hints, this fifth edition provides a valuable one-stop overview of Oracle Database 12c, including an introduction to Oracle and cloud computing. Oracle Essentials provides the conceptual background you need to understand how Oracle truly works. Topics include: A complete overview of Oracle databases and data stores, and Fusion Middleware products and features Core concepts and structures in Oracle's architecture, including pluggable databases Oracle objects and the various datatypes Oracle supports System and database management, including Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c Security options, basic auditing capabilities, and options for meeting compliance needs Performance characteristics of disk, memory, and CPU tuning Basic principles of multiuser concurrency Oracle's online transaction processing (OLTP) Data warehouses, Big Data, and Oracle's business intelligence tools Backup and recovery, and high availability and failover solutions