"I wish I had had 
this book 10 years ago. "

"Finally, I thank my wife, Kathy, who has been incredibly patient and understanding throughout the course of my writing this book. Nobody is looking forward to its completion more than she is."

looked up average salaries for oracle DBA professionals:

from http://www.dba-oracle.com/t_salary_salaries_compensation.htm  :

"Superstar DBA

    For those DBA Superstars with advanced degrees and specialized skills (RAC, Oracle Apps), the pay is often as high as age*6 and a 35 year-old superstar can earn up to $210k per year."
    
    
"By schema, I mean an Oracle database account that owns the database 
objects that an application uses."

"Although you can set DISTRIBUTED_LOCK_TIMEOUT to an arbitrarily high value, the highest value Oracle uses is 2,808,348,671 (seconds). Since this value equates to more than 88 years, it is not likely to be a limitation. "



"2. CREATE USER cdye IDENTIFIED BY yankeeclip 
3. DEFAULT TABLESPACE users 
4. TEMPORARY TABLESPACE temp; 
5.  
6. GRANT CREATE SESSION TO cdye; 
7.  
8. GRANT app_admin TO cdye; 
9.  
0. CREATE USER jblow IDENTIFIED BY aoldotcom 
1. DEFAULT TABLESPACE users 
2. TEMPORARY TABLESPACE temp; 
3.  
4. GRANT CREATE SESSION TO jblow; 
5.  
GRANT app_user to jblow; 
"

"Date goes on to enumerate 12 objectives that must be met in order to satisfy this 
principle, as follows: 
. Local autonomy 
2. No reliance on a single site 
3. Continuous operation 
4. Location transparency 
5. Fragmentation independence 
6. Replication independence 
7. Distributed query processing 
8. Distributed transaction management 
9. Hardware independence 
0. Operating system independence 
1. Network independence 
2. RDBMS independence 

i think replication is keeping mutiple idetical oracle databases on seperate servers synced up, the purpose being more reliability and speed..