5 comments about Oracle Performance Tuning Tips and Techniques.

1. Richard Nieniec has not only proven himself as a dynamic speaker, but as a writer as well. This book if full of needed information for any DBA, and is presented extremely well. This is not one to be read to as a sleep aid!! I highly recommend this book for Jr. to intermediate DBA's who understand how crucial performance really is. Explanations are clear and logical. Most readers who have worked in the Database field for any length of time will enjoy the wit and charisma of the writers.



2. I've bought a lot of books about Oracle tuning. And after having read all of them , it's obvious that ORACLE PERFORMANCE TUNING TIPS & TECHNIQUES is the best available. As a very good addition, get ORACLE8i INTERNAL SERVICES, ORACLE8i & UNIX PERFORMANCE TUNING, and ORACLE8i SQL HIGH PERFORMANCE TUNING. This is the perfect bookshelf for becoming a GURU ;-)



3. This book is well structured and offers lots of good tips to improve server side performances as well as application side improvements.



4. I was happy with this book and it can help u find orcale tuning problems and find results fast.



5. The guys who wrote this book know their stuff. The first chapter of the book will proabably address the majority of the problems that you will face with oracle performance tuning. The remaining chapters go in to detail on things to watch out for and various diagnostic tools and techniques.
   
   It is a hefty tome that is not meant to be read cover to cover, so I would have thought the index would have been a little better.

5 comments about Oracle Certified DBA Exam : Question and Answer Book.

1. Although I have been a DBA for sometime and have quite the collection of reference material, this book lacks the "concise" explanations after each question/answer that it advertises. The proofreading seems to have been an afterthought as well. I find that the official Oracle material and practice exams are by far more useful. This book is for database professionals who already have an intermediate level of knowledge who wish to get their certification.



2. Aside from the numerous spelling errors, even the "concise" explanations after the question/answer portions of this book are pale. This book is for people who have at least an intermediate level of knowledge of Oracle to get anything from this book or at times to decipher some of the explanations that make absolutely no sense at all. The official Oracle DBA certification exam guides and practice tests are the way to go for your certification!



3. Aside from the numerous spelling errors, even the "concise" explanations after the question/answer portions of this book are pale. This book is for people who have at least an intermediate level of knowledge of Oracle to get anything from this book or at times to decipher some of the explanations that make absolutely no sense at all. The official Oracle DBA certification exam guides and practice tests are the way to go for your certification!



4. A very poorly compiled, full of errors (spellings and contents) practice workbook. None of the three authors has actually passed the OCP DBA certification. This book should be entitled Element Oracle 101. It is definitely not the book that can help you to prepare the real OCP exams. I already returned the book and asked my money back. Very surprised the Prentice Hall can publish such a useless book. Shame to PH!



5. A very poorly compiled, full of errors (spellings and contents) practice workbook. None of the three authors has actually passed the OCP DBA certification. This book should be entitled Oracle for Dummies or Element Oracle 101. It is definitely not the book that can help you to prepare the real OCP exams. I already returned the book and asked my money back. Very surprised the Prentice Hall can publish such a useless book. Shame to PH!

No comments about Japan's Computer and Communications Industry: The Evolution of Industrial Giants and Global Competitiveness (Japanese Business and Economics).

4 comments about Oracle Internals Tips, Tricks, and Techniques for DBAs.

1. I have heard about a book "oracle internals" and I was curious to learn whats going on inside oracle; Instead, if I skim the table of contents I find that its a tohuwabohu of tips and tricks for everybody and noone.

   Nothing about internals just the usual stuff you can find everywhere. The title of this book is deceptive, I fear the content will be too and I will never buy (less read) it !




2. I was very impressed with the insights in this text. While the text is a mish-mosh of sundry topics, the contributors to this book include the best in the business, including Mike Ault, Brad Brown, and John Beresneicwz.

   There are really great article on the internal mechanisms of object management (freelists internals), buffer cache internals, and the internals of the shared pool (Mike Ault). These article alone were worth the price of the book, IMHO.




3. I generally don't like "collection" books, but this book was an exception. The topics are organized in a straightforward way and it is easy to skim the text looking for new information. While not every article was of interest to me, there were lot's of real gems in the collection. I now understand Oracle internals far better than before.



4. Here Oracle Internals refers to the Internal Code that you would not find in the sea of sameness on the books on Oracle. Oracle has matured as a technology and there are quite a few seasoned people out there. The book is targetted towards them. So if you are tired of reading select * from dual queries and want to see some industrial strength code go for this one. nice job

5 comments about High-Performance Oracle: Proven Methods for Achieving Optimum Performance and Availability.

1. This book tries to do too many things at once. It succeeds at none.
   For the informed reader, the skimpy chapters are at best overviews of well-known concepts. No new ideas are proposed. Ninety percent of the meager code centers around the author's useless dba_cool package: proactive object monitoring is much easier via excellent code provided in the 8i/9i Handbooks, and performance trending is a joy with scripts by Burleson. Bottleneck tuning must center on hardy SQL (Lewis, Adams), not on some esoteric package installed only on the author's databases. How many of you will be called to a site with a performance problem that has the author's package installed? Will you waste time installing it once you're there? Successful crisis management cannot rely on such methods. Serious texts on this subject must focus on efficient, time-tested methods applicable anywhere with very little effort. At times, it seems the book is one big advertisement to download dba_cool (don't!!!).

   For the less knowledgeable reader, High-Performance Oracle is simply not a tutorial-style book, and does not contain sufficient explanations and examples for the reader to learn anything. Its choice of material is questionable, and -- before I threw it out in disgrace -- i often wondered who it was written for (despite the author's statement that it was aimed at both the dba and the developer). Important concepts are brushed aside for irrelevant comparisons between expensive tools of questionable relevancy for most DBAs. Advanced topics such as RAC aren't seriously covered. (Don't be mislead by the table of contents.)...




2. this book is pretty much the only Oracle book I've seen that covers 9.2 features in depth. Ingram's DbCool GUI software from author's website is a great companion to the book, but not mandatory. I use it daily alongside TOAD but DbCool is free (!?). DbCool explain plain shows the incredibly useful filter and access predicates new in 9.2 plan.
   Buried away on the website for the book (see back page of book)is loads of free stuff which some Oracle consultants charge for, audit, healthcheck, jpeg space charts and nice doc on Change Manager and native compiling for PL/SQL and Java. Hats off to the author for all the free stuff and long may it continue. Book worth every penny.



3. Geoff Ingram's book is one of the best Performance-based texts out on the market. Very few books provide the wealth of knowledge that Geoff Ingram does in this book. The sections on SQL tuning and Indexes provided information rarely covered in other Oracle books.

   What I liked most from this book was Geoff's comments about Oracle and the ISV (Independent Software Vendor). I'm a performance engineer from a respected ISV that primarily uses Oracle as its RDBMS. His commentary was so on about how the ISV in most cases does not understand the role of Oracle in their solution as it relates to tuning...

   I hope to see more books from Geoff Ingram in the future. It would be nice to see a follow-up book dedicated to SQL tuning...

   Regards,

   Steve




4. i love this book! It's maybe the first book to cover the end to end management of Oracle completely not just the server, in a modern way. Oracle brags about how admin is easier these days and this book shows why it's true. But there should be a warning on the cover. Old school DBAs who spend lots of time on row chaining, microplacement of database files, fragmentation, STATSPACK (which is covered) for performance etc won't like it. I finally ditched tar and dd for backups and started using RMAN based on the RMAN chapter in this book. I just wish i'd done it years ago, but i guess I was stuck in denial. If you want your eyes opened on how to manage Oracle in the future not the past buy this book!



5. I love this book! It covers many subjects areas in depth that other books just don't, see contents list. Oracle brags about why 9.2 can reduce admin overhead by 40% and this book shows you how. Old school DBAs that spend all their time on defrag, obsessed with file placement, STATSPACK for tuning etc probably won't like it. I finally stopped using dd and tar for backup and started using RMAN as a result of this book. Now i wish i did it years ago. If you want to manage Oracle in the future not the past, buy this book.

5 comments about Oracle9i Application Server Portal Handbook (Osborne ORACLE Press Series).

1. The book gives you an overview of the installation and development of Oracle Portals. You can also find this information in other Oracle Portal books previously published. The author gives you the basis to develop the forms, reports, charts and calendars in Oracle Portal. The advance programming topics are only mention. You can find a more complete information for Oracle Portal Development in Oracle OTN. If you already bought Oracle 9ias Portal Bible or Web Development with Oracle Products, you do not need this book. If you want advance programming with Oracle Portal, you do not need this book either.



2. The "critic" who rated this book a "1" had an ax to grind with one of the authors before the book was even released!!



3. Outstanding in its clarity. Especially useful in first giving an overview/purpose for exercises, and, then, going thru an exercise step by step. Remarkably error and typo-free compared to many other technical, more expensive computer textbooks I've used in a classroom.



4. The installation procedure is in some points wrong. so a beginner has no chance to run the samples. The theory part of this book is not bad but in some chapters more or less stuff for kids! A frank advice, try to find another book.



5. Oracle Portal allows you to "Webify" a database, as well as to create a general-purpose portal for your users. The ideas and techniques from this book helped me get a database of mine onto the Web quickly and efficiently. Everything you'll need is there, from the initial installation of the product, to on-going administration of your portal(s). In between is a thorough treatment of what should be done to facilitate browser-based access to your data.

   The book doesn't just dump syntax on you. It explains what portals are, and how to plan for one before building it. Key features of the Oracle product are explained clearly, first at a high level, so that you will later understand what you're doing when it gets to "click here, and type there." And, when it does get down to the lowest-level details, the book reflects the care that the authors must have taken to ensure accuracy.

   All-in-all, a thorough treatment that should be indispensable to new Portal developers, while still offering value to all but the most advanced and experienced ones.

5 comments about Oracle8i: A Beginner's Guide.

1. I'm an Biz/IT consultant trying to pick up Oracle 8i from scratch. I think the so-called "beginner" aspect stems from the fact that it tries to explain very basic IT terminologies such as Intranet, Internet, client, server, TCP/IP etc at the beginning of each chapter. I find most of the explanations quite appauling though.

   I think the author should devote more time illustrating data modeling terminologies such as tablespace, schema, dropping of database, mounting etc... I find no explanations to these.

   The author also spend much time blowing whistle for Oracle and write about Oracle being the database of the future, and what powerful features it has. Lots of big words used, but no examples nor illustration of how they can be done. It's frustrating to waste time reading these.

   In conclusion, I find that this is a very huge book with little substance and poor organization. I've read it for days but don't seem to gain much from it. I'm looking for another book to buy, that explains why I'm in here.




2. This book is great for total beginners who have little to no experience with networks and databases. If you are looking for a general reference book, the book will be sufficient for basic stuff. For more complicated things like writing subqueries, inner joins, outer joins, stored procedures, creating data models and database administration, you should get a dedicated book. For professionals who want a good general reference book, a general purpose database administration book is a better bet. If you're used to GUI database administration, then get a good PLSQL book instead. There's no substitute for detailed knowledge and expertise with SQL and command line.



3. All I can say is this book is great to get a person up to speed with Oracle products. The portion of the book explaining all the parts that make up the Oracle package and the installation are worth the price alone.



4. I am totaly novice in Oracle DBA programing. When I bought this book I thought it would be a good place to start. Well, I was completely dissapointed. This book is neither for beginers nor for some who knows basic DBA programming. Today I returned it to the bookstore.



5. I am an absolute beginner in Oracle, and I was looking for a book that will show me step-by-step how to create and administer an Oracle database. This book will give you a little idea how to administer an Oracle database alright, but it is assuming you already have a database to administer!... Gladly, I just borrowed this book. Now I understand why the guy who lent it wasn't very happy with his purchase.

5 comments about Oracle9i JDeveloper Handbook.

1. I have to be honest, when I first picked up this heavy
   book (with two hands mind you) I sighed at noticing it was almost 1000
   pages. Those discouraging feelings were short lived after a quick look at
   the Table of Contents.

   The book accurately delivers everything a developer would need to get
   started in writing and designing production quality applications. I cannot
   say enough about how well organized the content and examples are with this
   book. Below are only a small handful of the reasons I will be recommending
   this book to my colleagues.

   1.) Great flow. Many books with multiple authors don't effectively flow. In
   some cases, the authors often contradict each other. Not the case with this
   book. The writing style is extremely consistant.
   2.) In depth coverage on BC4J, application development methodologies with
   JDeveloper, debugging, Java Client / JSP development, and deployment
   considerations.
   3.) The examples are first-rate. All of the examples accurately clarify the
   subject matter.
   4.) It covers EVERYTHING you would need to know and nothing more.

   In short, this book is the most efficient way to learn Oracle JDeveloper.

   Regards,
   -- jeff
   ---------------------------------------
   Jeffrey Hunter, OCP
   Senior Database Administrator
   http://www.idevelopment.info
   ---------------------------------------




2. I am actually a Lotus Notes programmer by trade (OK, stop laughing!) who has been dabbling with a variety of other programming languages for many years (C++, Java, VB, C#, etc), so I have had some exposure to Object Oriented programming and developer GUI's going back to GWBasic. I have also recently begun to dabble with Oracle 8i and 9i, installing them on my laptop and on a Linux box so that I would have Oracle available to me as a learning resource. I am by no stretch of the imagination a programming wizard, but I can quickly make myself useful in any programming environment with good reference material as my starting point.

   I recently decided that I needed to try to put myself in a better position in the job market by extending my working knowledge of both Java and Oracle. Oracle JDeveloper appeared to be the best tool for accomplishing this objective and the Oracle 9i JDeveloper Handbook has proven to be an excellent learning source for such a vast product.

   There are several factors that make JDeveloper a complex and powerful tool. First of all, it allows you to create and edit all things Java -- from basic Java classes and simple Java console applications, to JavaBeans, JSP pages, Swing/AWT Java applications and applets, Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs), servlets, you name it. Additionally, the JDeveloper product has a class modeling tool that at first I thought was just for drawing UML diagrams, but it actually can be used the way that UML is supposed to be used -- to produce actual database tables that embody the properties that you specify in the JDeveloper GUI. All of this functionality is already a massive undertaking but then you add on to that the use of Oracle Business Components for Java (BC4J) and things get really hairy.

   Probably one of the most difficult things to wrap my brain around is the BC4J architecture, not because it is confusing but because it is very powerful and seems to be very extensive and very well thought out. I can say this because in the JDeveloper Handbook the examples and the scenarios that are used to explain the BC4J object model and architecture effectively convey the benefit and flexibility of using BC4J.

   JDeveloper is very integrated with the Oracle database platform. It very quickly and easily can read your database tables and do a lot of the grunt work of putting an object model over your database structures using BC4J. And, as I mentioned earlier, you can "forward engineer" your tables by creating your UML diagrams first and using those to create the underlying database tables (aren't tables just there to enable the object model to persist?). As I continued through the book, the BC4J concepts (which I must emphasize are a very important part of this product) become more and more familiar and I see their value more and more.

   This is all to say that the JDeveloper tool is much more extensive than I first realized and obviously has a very high level of integration with the Oracle database platform. There is a lot of ground to cover and this book methodically plods through it. For newbie's, it covers everything from using the IDE to debugging, with plenty of examples for creating a wide variety of the different kinds of projects JDeveloper supports. For old Java veterans, I think what you'll appreciate the most is the material on BC4J and how much easier it's going to make your Java / Oracle programming. The book covers it all at what I feel is a good level of detail with a lot of examples and scenarios that make the concepts clear and useful.

   I am really glad I bought this book and I have only read half-way through it! I know I will be reading every page and will continue to refer to it for all the different kinds of examples that it covered. There is no way I could have tapped into half of the power of this tool without this book. Thanks to Peter Koletzke, Dr. Paul Dorsey, and Dr. Avrom Faderman for effectively taking on such massive challenge.




3. This book covers only the basic concepts and is very similar to JDeveloper help.
   I was going through the JSP examples that
   are included in this book. This book has examples how to create a List of Value.
   It does not allow saving a record once you select an item from a list.
   It really does not work. I found this book is little helpful but one can get that
   help from JDeveloper help.



4. I received this book as a gift after I made it known I wanted to learn how to use Oracle's JDeveloper. When I began reading it, I winced over the cautions about who should read the book. Although I am proficient in Access and have done some VBScript and JavaScript client-side applications, I am new to J2EE and to Oracle. However, I hoped that reading the book would give me a good explanation of the basics of JDeveloper and that I could fill in the holes later. Unfortunately, the book did not provide many explanations of the basics and some of those attempts were pretty vague. For instance, it was not until somewhere shortly after page 400 that the distinction between Views and Entities became clear. In reviewing the earlier 'explanations' with the benefit of hindsight, they still did not seem to be very clear about what was just pointers and what held actual data.
   The authors could, with very little additional effort, have provided short, clear explanations for basic concepts. That would have greatly improved the readability for a wider range of readers. It was this failure to provide better explanations of the basics that led me to title this review, "Missed Opportuniites".



5. This book contains a lot of material regarding BC4J and the jDeveloper IDE. Unfortunately, BC4J has been deprecated in 10g. [...]

5 comments about Easy Oracle PHP: Create Dynamic Web Pages with Oracle Data (Easy Oracle Series).

1. As the series editor for this book I was involved in Gogala's book, from initial inception to finished product, and I'm impressed. Oracle offers a wealth of different tools to create dynamic web pages (Apex (HTML-DB), Jdeveloper, Ruby on Rail on Oracle, etc.) and PHP is an excellent choice because it is powerful, mature and has well-tested Oracle interfaces.
   
   It's very difficult to take a complex topic such as Oracle with PHP and condense it into an understandable and concise framework, but Gogala has met this challenge.
   
   PHP is, by its very nature, a flexible and robust language, and I was happy to see that Gogala resisted the temptation to go into all of the advanced PHP features.
   
   This is not an advanced PHP Oracle book. Rather, it is a get-started guide with lots of simple, easy to understand examples, and working Oracle PHP code snippets in the code download to allow beginners to get started fast. Mladen spent hundreds of hours refining his text and working with Steve Karam, his technical editor, and I hope that you will agree that this is a great way to get started with Oracle databases on the web.



2. I am afraid that Donald Burleson's kudos for this book, for which he is the series editor, means that he did not read it. This book is riddled with typographical errors, in both the code and the text. The code examples that you download do not always match the corresponding example from the book, and in some cases, neither work. Also, be aware that only the `include' files are available for download. The examples from each chapter, which is the majority of code in the book, are not available. Save your money.



3. For those us who need to provide CIO's with an alternative to buying expensive Event Management Monitoring tools, Mladen's book provides the perfect blueprint to merging SQL scripts into web pages. They key here is easy dyamic web pages.
   
   Most of the the time, management wants to see results in easy to read Web formatting that easily displays the current state of systems: hence, expensive monitoring tools. Using PHP, one can write an effective but cheap portable monitoring solution by utilizing existing sql scripts within PHP. As such, this book has provided me an important opportunity to show cost conscience management a real working alternative to laying out $250k for monitoring tools.



4. Mladen did an excellent job bringing Oracle and PHP together in his book, Easy Oracle PHP. As a Sr. Oracle DBA and a long time PHP developer, I was honored to be a part of its release as a technical editor.
   
   Easy Oracle PHP contains many outstanding examples of the possible uses of these two powerful technologies. In addition, the book is easy to read and understand, despite both PHP and Oracle being potentially complex topics. The many examples and scripts in this book were well written by Mr. Gogala, and I personally tested each one. These step-by-step scripts make it easy for anyone, even beginners, to become well accommodated with the many uses of PHP; the scripts even give the developer the basis for a very handy Oracle database monitoring tool!
   
   A good knowledge of PHP has become something of an competitive edge in the development world. This book provides the methods by which anyone can learn to use it with the most powerful database software on the public market.



5. PHP isn't a magical solution to dynamic HTML, but it comes as close as anything is likely to. I've met Gogala at a few OUG meetings and he knows his stuff. If you aren't familiar with the topic read the book twice - first time leafing through to get an overview of the capabilities then a second drilling down. Time well spent. Throwing together a quick EIS dashboard using PHP is a great way to please the guys with the checkbooks. Like lighting a match in front of jungle natives, they'll bow down, cry "Great Juju!" and brag about it to other holders of unearned stock options at the golf club.

5 comments about Oracle 8I Administration and Management.

1. This is a great book if you are using 8i features and want to avoid some of the 'bumpies'. Example: Mike Ault's book is the only one I know of which warns you about putting an error-handler in your database-wide login trigger. If you don't do that (as I found out before I bought the book) you're going to be climbing in the back window by way of Server Manager to get your database functioning again.

   It's a good book with a huge number of good scripts. You should buy it.




2. I found this book to be very helpful, especially as we are migrating from various 8.0.X versions. Much of the information and the scripts were useful with our exisitng systems but the real benefit will come when we convert all of our servers to 8.1.6. I think the book is clear and easy to follow - no errors so far. Even though some of the information is geared toward Unix (all of our boxes, except one is NT 4), the information is presented well enough that NT and Unix users alike will benefit.



3. I bought the book because of the "monitoring database tables, indexes, clusters, snapshots, and objects" chapter. Lots of good SQL scripts on how to get the information you need to monitor your database. In addition, each script has a corresponding sample output section. This helps you see what output the script is going to generate.



4. Mike has done a superb job in this text. People who work as DBAs for a living need the kind of in-depth and comprehensive treatment of highly technical material, and Mike excels at this task.



5. This is one of best DBA books for Oracle DBA. I not well with English, but this one easy to read and use.