Recently I was tasked to create a program that uses Oracle as its backend. Knowing nothing about Oracle I picked up a book "Hands-on Oracle Database 10g Express Edition for Windows". This book has been pretty helpful along the way. If you are planning on using Oracle for the long term I would suggest installing Oracle 10g Standard on a stand alone server, otherwise use the express edition, it will suit your needs. Okay, so on with the lessons I've learned along the way, hopefully this will help you avoid the same pitfalls.

1. If you're using .Net you can't use command.parameters.addwithvalue. This just won't work. You need to pass your parameters inline with your query.
   
   
2. There is NO identity seed column in Oracle?! - Being a SQL guy this one was awfully weird. If you want to increment a value in the Identity(Primary Key) column then you need to create a sequence and assign that sequence to the PK field. Next you need to add a trigger to the column to call that sequence upon Inserts or call it manually from your insert statement. What I did was create a helper function that takes the column name and table name and does a 'Select Max(columnName) from tableName' and returns the value + 1.
   
   
3. Column Name are "nOt CaSeSeNsItIvE" - Yeah right.... I figured the best way to see how Oracle creates a Create Table script so I created a script from a table in Oracle and it put quotes around all the table and column names. So I figured this was the way it was done. NOPE! Only use quotes around table and column names IF you want the column or table name to be case sensitive, otherwise leave them out. This will save you the 8 hours of frustration I went through while trying to perform database calls in your code.
   
   
4. There is no such thing as a database in Oracle?! - I'm still trying to figure this one out. Seems like tables are tied to users, not databases. Actually, there is no database option in Oracle. You log in as a user and start creating tables. I'm still lost with this one so hopefully someone can explain it to me.
   
   
5. Well there is no 5 Yet but I'm sure there will be.