After completing my first 10 years with database technologies and 8 years with Oracle, I can guarantee this to newbies; after years of experience and reading, you still feel you are at the beginning. For me this feeling is special since if you like, love what you are doing than there you may go deeper and deeper as you wish through the years, no need to hurry. Especially the internal topics which are not documented officially will take extra effort, some dumping and reverse engineering most probably.
Of course it is really good to have below resources and sharing people around you during this journey –
tahiti – http://tahiti.oracle.com
asktom – http://asktom.oracle.com
otn – http://otn.oracle.com
forums – http://forums.oracle.com
metalink – http://metalink.oracle.com
Also some experts, aces who are voluntarily giving their best effort to blog, publish articles, prepare small demos to improve your understanding and reply your problems over forums. This way of learning is very different from 5 years before, much more efficient. I am working with 20 years old young engineers for the last 5 years and I have seen them developing so quickly under my guidance and using these resources, I may easily say within 3-4 years of consistent development they pass me and start to develop me :)
So here comes the feature who let me have above feelings and write all these; from 10g the RETURNING clause can be aggregated to return a single record or value from data affected by DML activity, did you know this one? Not a big one and there are workarounds for this need but check this, when you need it you will like to use it, I know –
Code Listing 110-Aggregating data with returning clause
Last words for the new kid on the block, 11g again, here is a forums thread which you may want to contribute for the new features of the new pop star of the Oracle Blogsphere :).
Also tahiti now has the 11g link :)
Extract(Read) > Transform(Test&Apply) > Load(Learn) Blog 