Rick Greenwald has been active in the world of computer software for over two decades, including stints with Data General, Cognos, and Gupta. He is currently Director of Product Management with Oracle Corporation, responsible for the Oracle Database Cloud. He has been a principal author of 19 books and countless articles on a variety of technical topics, and has spoken at conferences and training sessions across six continents. Rick's titles include 4 editions of Oracle Essentials (principal author with Robert Stackowiak and Jonathan Stern, O'Reilly Media, Inc), a number of books on Application Express and its predecessors, and books on data warehousing, Oracle programming and Exadata. Robert Stackowiak has more than 25 years of experience in data warehousing and business intelligence architecture, software development, new database and systems product introduction, and technical sales and sales consulting. During the writing of this edition of Oracle Essentials, he is Vice President of Big Data and Analytics Architecture in Oracle's Enterprise Solutions Group. He has spoken on related Oracle topics at a wide variety of conferences including Gartner Group's BI Summit, TDWI, ComputerWorld's BI & Analytics Perspectives, Oracle OpenWorld, and numerous IOUG events. Among the other books he co-authored are the following: Achieving Extreme Performance with Oracle Exadata (McGraw-Hill Oracle Press), Professional Oracle Programming (WROX), and Oracle Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence Solutions (Wiley). He can be followed on Twitter @rstackow Jonathan Stern used more than 13 years of experience in contributing to the original edition of this book. His background included senior positions in consulting, systems architecture, and technical sales at Oracle and other companies. He demonstrated in-depth knowledge of the Oracle Database across major open systems hardware and operating systems. His expertise included Database tuning, scaling, parallelism, clustering, and high availability for transaction processing systems and data warehousing implementations. Some of the fundamentals of Oracle that he originally contributed to the first edition live on in this edition of Oracle Essentials though much has changed in the Oracle Database since Jonathan passed on. Each edition of this book is a reminder of the talent and attention to detail that he possessed.