Things to know before you know Oracle. Ideally Oracle is a step in your soft knowledge intellect, so to make sure it’s not a giant step into the deep end for you, know your fundamentals. Irrespective of whether you want to be an Application Developer or a Database Administrator you need to have a grasp of the basics of database. A great stepping stone to Oracle is a good understanding of Microsoft Access, and to really get as much out of an Oracle course as possible, you should have already covered the basic concepts of Tables, Views, Queries, Primary Keys, Foreign Keys, Types of Indexes, Columns as well as the common different data types. Finally for bedtime reading you could also benefit by learning the concepts of table spaces, partitions, stored procedures, packages and functions, business objects, etc.