"This book is the go-to guide for all things Oracle. It provides management level guidance for successfully navigating and managing the Oracle-verse. Coverage includes executive level overviews of the Oracle product line - features and benefits; management best practices; user/developer lessons learned; management considerations; compliance and security considerations, and management metrics"-- "Preface Cloud. Database. Middleware. Applications. Exalogic. Exalytics. Java. Servers. Virtualization. Storage. What do these, and the rest of those products listed in Figure P.1, all have in common? Simple. It's Oracle. Oracle is just about everywhere, in every category, as shown in Table P.1, and it has the market share to prove it. According to Gartner, Inc., Oracle is number one in worldwide RDBMS (relational database management system) software revenue share, holds a larger revenue share than the four closest competitors combined, and leads the next closest competitor's revenue share by 29%. So it's a no-brainer that now, or sometime in the near future, most executives will be confronted with having to manage one or more Oracle products. Given the share diversity of the Oracle product line, and the level of complexity of integration, management is quite a daunting prospect. However, all is not rosy in the Kingdom of Oracle. A recent Fortune magazine article asked, "What you do when you're the best company in your industry, but your industry is mired in a slump of mediocre performance?" (Kelleher 2013). This is not really a book about Oracle's financial performance. However, it is important, when making a commitment to Oracle products and services, to understand the ramifications tied to what many consider to be a macroeconomic slowdown in the global market. Many argue, however, that it's not so much the global economics that's the problem. These pundits say that the doldrums the industry is facing are caused by the shift to cloud computing. This is probably the reason that Oracle is placing such an emphasis on its cloud products. We will touch on many of these products in several chapters of this book"--