Beginning Oracle Database 11g Administration From Novice to Professional

CHAPTER 6
Database Creation
Who verily knows and who can here declare it, whence it was born and whence
comes this creation?
The Gods are later than this world’s production. Who knows then whence it first
came into being?
He, the first origin of this creation, whether he formed it all or did not form it,
Whose eye controls this world in highest heaven, he verily knows it, or perhaps he
knows not.
—The Hymns of the Rigveda by Ralph T. H. Griffith
(E. J. Lazarus and Co., Benares, 1897)
Oracle makes the process of creating a database as easy as eating pie—a database can be
created from scratch in a few minutes to an hour, depending on its complexity. Mogens
Norgaard, the CEO of a Danish company called Miracle A/S, recorded one of his employees,
Morten Egan, clad in a straitjacket and creating a database in about thirty minutes by
typing on his keyboard with his nose!
The reason for this demonstration was that a service provider had quoted fifty hours
of labor to create a database. When viewers of the video protested that Egan had only
created a very simple database, Norgaard recorded a video of Egan creating a more
complex database in less than an hour, once again clad in a straitjacket and typing on
the keyboard with his nose. In the same video, a fourteen-year-old intern named Daniel
Christensen demonstrated that he, too, was capable of creating an Oracle database; he
did it in twenty-six minutes.
To find both videos, search the YouTube catalog for the phrase “Unconventional
Oracle Installation.” Here are the opening remarks from the second video:
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