Learn how to use and design databases, make them hum, sing and dance, and understand what makes them tick. A database is like an appliance that users need to understand and use as experts but they do not need to understand how to build the appliance. This book provides a comprehensive coverage of database principles and practice. The author teaches databases without burdening the reader with theorems and internal algorithms and methods used to implement database systems. The Oracle database system is used for the examples.

Narain Gehani is a world-renowed expert in databases, web technologies and software. Dr Gehani has coauthored several major software systems, including the pioneering Ode database, the Concurrent C/C++ parallel programming language, and the Maps On Us website.
Dr Gehani holds 12 patents, has written and edited many books, and is the author or coauthor of about 75 papers in computer science. He has served on the numerous program conference committees and was an ACM National Lecturer for several years. Currently, he is the dean of the College of Computing Sciences at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Before that, he was with Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies. He got his PhD in computer science from Cornell University in 1975.

Melliyal Annamalai is a database expert, researcher and developer. She has worked at Oracle for over 12 years, primarily working on projects related to the management of non-relational types of data in the database, such as imaging data, multimedia data and semantic data. She began her career at Oracle with the development of high-performance image management architectures. Now, she defines the strategy and direction for database imaging features that include functionality for medical and geospatial images.

Dr Annamalai is also deeply involved in improving access to high quality science and IT education for students from less privileged backgrounds and locations around the world. She was awarded the prestigious Graduate Student Research Program Fellowship from NASA to pursue a PhD in Computer Science from Purdue University, which she received in 1997.