Preface

This Preface includes the following information:

• How This Book is Organized

• What You Will Need In Addition To This Guide

• Notation

How This Book is Organized

This Guide is organized into 5 parts.

1. Introduction -- Chapters 1 and 2 provide basic information, including introduction of a comprehensive example.

2. Data Cartridge Components -- Chapters 3 through 9 lay out the components that go into building a data cartridge.

3. Advanced Topics -- Chapters 10 and 11 discuss design considerations and using Oracle cartridges.

4. A Comprehensive Example -- Chapter 12 elaborates the Power Utility example introduced in chapter 3.

5. Reference -- Chapters 13 through 15 provide data cartridge specific reference.

What You Will Need In Addition To This Guide

This book on its own does not provide you with all the information you might need to build every kind of data cartridge. This is because generic Oracle technology -- that is, technology that is not specific to data cartridges -- is defined in the manuals, guides and reference books that make up rest of the Oracle documentation set.

In reading through the chapters, you will come across many references to these manuals. We suggest that you keep the Oracle documentation set by your side.

Notation

The following notation is used in this Guide:

[ ]	Square brackets enclose optional items in syntax descriptions.
< >	Angle brackets enclose the name of a syntactic element in syntax descriptions.
{ }	Braces enclose items, only one of which is required.
|	A vertical bar separates options within brackets or braces
. .	Two dots separate the lowest and highest values in a range.
. . .	An ellipsis shows that the preceding parameter can be repeated or that statements or clauses irrelevant to the discussion were left out

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