What you need for this book

All database servers, clients, and other various hosts used through the book are virtual machines that are created and configured using Oracle Virtual Box. Some of the recipes will contain prerequisites about the operating system and the Oracle server and client versions to be used. You will need a system with sufficient processing power to sustain the many virtual machines that are running under Oracle Virtual Box simultaneously. We recommend you use a system very similar to Intel Corei3-2100 CPU 3.10 Ghz, 8 Gb RAM, MS Windows 7 Enterprise 64-bit SP1, which we used for all recipes in this book.

We must stress the importance of using a sandbox environment to duplicate the recipes in this book. Some recipes are intended for demonstration purposes and should not be done in a production environment.