Many people think the rise of the Internet in the mid-1990s was a rare event never to be repeated again in our lifetime. They are infinitely wrong! In the last version of the book, I noted that Terabyte databases would be everywhere soon; few people believed me. It’s happened; Terabyte databases are now quite common. With Oracle 10g, Petabyte databases (1,000 Terabytes) will start to come of age, and Exabyte databases (1,000,000 Terabytes) may even make an entrance by Oracle 11g (almost definitely by Oracle12g of the database).