This text ties together the commercial world of Oracle and the free-wheeling world of open source software, revealing that these two worlds are not as far apart as they may seem. Today, there are many excellent and freely available software tools that Oracle developers and database administrators can use, at no cost, to improve their own coding productivity and their system's performance. Moreover, many of the finest Oracle developers are now making their source code freely available so their peers can build upon this code base. Oracle Corporation is even porting its RDBMS to Linux and starting to incorporate a growing number of open source tools in the company's own software. The book describes close to 100 open source tools you can use for Oracle development and database administration, from large and widely known open source systems (like Linux, Perl, Apache, TCL/Tk and Python) to more Oracle-specific tools (like Orasoft, Orac, OracleTool, and OraSnap). It shows how to obtain the software and how to adapt it to best advantage. The book contains code examples, download and installation instructions, and helpful usage hints.
The book tells how to find and use existing open source code and provides the details and the motivation to build your own open source contributions and release them to the Oracle community. It gives instruction about tools like the Oracle Call Interface (OCI) and Perl-DBI (Database Interface), which provide the glue allowing new open source tools to link into commercial Oracle software.