Part I
Basic OCI Concepts

This part of the guide contains chapters that describe basic OCI programming concepts:

• Chapter 1, "Introduction, New Features, and Upgrading", provides an introduction to the OCI and discusses features that are new to release 8i.

• Chapter 2, "OCI Programming Basics", discusses the basic concepts of OCI programming.

• Chapter 3, "Datatypes", describes datatypes used in OCI applications and within the Oracle database Server.

• Chapter 4, "SQL Statement Processing", discusses how to process SQL statements using the Oracle OCI.

• Chapter 5, "Binding and Defining", discusses bind and define operations in detail.

• Chapter 6, "Describing Schema Metadata", discusses the OCIDescribeAny() function.

• Chapter 7, "LOB and FILE Operations", discusses the OCI functions that perform operations on large objects (LOBs) in a database and external LOBs (FILEs).

• Chapter 8, "Managing Scalable Platforms", discusses password management, session management, and thread safety.

• Chapter 9, "OCI Programming Advanced Topics", covers advanced topics in OCI programming, such as user-defined callbacks and Advanced Queuing.