Most Oracle developers love cursors. I mean, it's so obvious they're in love. If you read an Oracle PL/SQL developer guide, it will be full of sappy love poetry dedicated to the art of writing cursors.

Another thing you will see a lot of in Oracle is old school non-ANSI join syntax. When (not if) you do see something like this, then don't freak out; it's basically the same as a left outer join.

SELECT Table_A.letter, Table_B.letter

FROM Table_A, Table_B

WHERE Table_A.letter(+) = Table_B.letter;

The example below is what's called a NATURAL JOIN. Now this is a piece of work. Because these two tables share a common key column, Oracle will just make an assumption about how they should be joined, I guess because it saves the developer all the additional keystrokes required to explicitly code the join. On the downside, if your employer measures your productivity in terms of how many lines of code you can write in an hour, then this style of coding will work against you. However, I can think of even more practical reasons why natural joins are a bad idea.

SELECT region_id, r.region_name, c.country_id, c.country_name

FROM countries c

NATURAL JOIN regions r;