I agree completely. The post is nothing more than a "hey, if you're not using ssh for these two things, maybe take a look." I went this route because there are so many other full fledged introductions to ssh, that I thought it'd almost be a waste of my time. I'm sorry that reading it wasted yours.
~/.ssh/config:
# This is maybe useful if you get dropped all the time
# due to stricter SSHd rules.
ServerAliveInterval 60
# Instead of tunneling always with the CLI directly why not
# make a entry in your ssh config to make it easy, e.g.
HostName your.companies.host
User username
LocalForward 9999 clients.oracle.server.name:1521
# You can also use "Port" if the SSHd is on a non 22 port
On the CLI:
# Does all the tunneling automatically
ssh your.companies.host