No comments about ATG TO SUPPORT ORACLE9I APP SERVER.(ATG Dynamo e-Business Platform): An article from: Software Industry Report.

5 comments about Oracle8 DBA: Backup and Recovery Exam Cram (Exam: 1Z0-015).

1. I just passed my first OCP test today,3 hours ago. Before reading this book, I tried the free self-test sofware from Oracle and made only 40%. Today I made 90% or 54 corrects out of 60 questions in the real exam. Without this book, I surely will fail, especially at the Recovery Manager sections (18 questions) which I am not familiar with. Besides, thanks to this book, I found many mistakes I made in the backup strategy for our databases and corrected them. Thanks, Debbie!. You wrote a great book!. It helped me more than the 2000-dollar course I attended.



2. This is definitely the best of the 5 cram books for Oracle8 DBA certification exams. The author demonstrated that she is an experienced DBA in Oracle. I have never touched Oracle but I have been DBA for many years and I know a good DBA when I see one. I luckily passed all exams in 9 weeks using the cram books. Thank you Debbie!



3. this book is very average. i think that people are looking at their passing scores on the b&R test and just assuming the book helped them a great deal. truth is, the test isn't that hard if you study the general material. and sure, the book presents the general material... but it does so in a scatterbrained and unorganized fashion. the explanations of utilities such as rman and theories of restore/recovery are presented in a very ambiguous manner. (if you don't use rman, you'll have a test time grasping it's used based on the chapters in this book) plus, there's a lot of extra stuff that you don't need to know. sure, it's nice to know everything - but this book is for test preparation, right? the book is ok... maybe worth 3 stars. (and yes, i passed with a good score and i used the book) however, i'm giving it 2 based on the facts that it's ranked too high already, and it's pretty disappointing for a book that should be an easy write for a qualified DBA.



4. I finished reading the book in just a week and took the exam afterwards and got 57/60 in the exam. Great book for OCP preparation. I have only a couple of months of Oracle experience and do not know anything about Oracle backup and recovery before I read the book. The only other preparation material that I used is Selftest Software. In fact, a lot of questions are either same or similar in these two packages.

   But in real world, you probably will need another book and more practice in your implementation of your backup and restore strategy.




5. Excellent preparation for the exam. Like the Performance Tuning, DBA, and Network Exam Crams, the material is well organized, thorough, and the practice exams are harder than the real thing.

No comments about How To Use Formatting in Oracle SQL: Perception is Key!.

5 comments about Freeze My Margarita: A Sam Jones Novel.

1. Lauren has produced another entertaining read. Sam Jones has yet again found herself in the mitts of a mystery. She meets up with an old friend who asks her to think about making some piece of art for a performance of Midnight Summer's Dream. She agrees and everything from love, death and odd diet control techniques follow. This book would have been a 5 if it hadn't covered the production aspects of a play so much. I really didn't enjoy that bit. Otherwise, another fun read from Lauren Henderson! And if you finish the book you will understand the title.



2. The second Sam Jones novel is wonderful and even better than the first. Sam wants men who are good in bed, don't ask questions, are sardonic and have a great bodies. She likes a nice ass, 6 pack abs and a big "organ". She is delightful.

   Almost a half of the novel is not dealing with murder at all but detailing Sam's luscious view of the world of theatre. In a fetish bar, Sam meets an old friend from design school who is now working on designing the set for a production of Midsummer Night's Dream. Sally (a very gay Italian with a theek accent) convinces her that her mobiles would be great as the forest and look like chandeliers for the indoor scenes.

   Sam goes to work making her mobiles at the theatre and is introduced to the cast and crew. Melanie Marsh (MM) is the director and she is talented, focused and never raises her voice. She will direct a smashing play that gets rave reviews and makes the career of many of the actors. Hugo is Oberon and when we first meet him we are sure he is a hunk, but gay. It turns out he is not, but playing the part to annoy another member of the cast who he dislikes and who dislikes him. He has been chatting up Sam and she is attracted to his wry humor, quick wit and 6 pack abs. When he drops his towel in front of her and stands there naked, she understands he is not gay and their relationship begins. Hugo is so much the type Sam loves, she is starting to get mushy about him and feels jealousy! Sam jealous?!

   The wit is wonderful as this brief excerpt will attest: there is a heavy conversation and then a pause after something weighty is said. "'God,' Hugo drawled at last, I've always avoided doing Pinter and now I know why.'" You have to know about the Pinter pauses to get this, and if you do, it is great fun.

   I suspect that like me, once you start this series it will be hard to stop.




3. I'm sorry, but I did not like this book. Her first, Black Rubber Dress, I couldn't put down. I really enjoyed it. This one to me was boring and seemed to drag on and on. It was almost to the last chapters before it started heating up and became interesting. This is one I would not recommend or keep.



4. Clothes...clothes and more clothes, haute couture name-dropping, ensembles, accessories, jodhpurs, faille and chenille...endless descriptions of character's clothes!...Argh! The off-white, off-the-shoulder, and off-the rack nattering just drove me off-my-rocker in this book!

   OK, I didn't hate this book. It was OK. But it was very, very lightweight, and didn't click for me. With a little more silliness, it could have been a 'daahling!' parody of a mystery novel, or going the other way, it could have been genuinely scary.
   But the characters are mostly airheads, and there's too much focus on theater production and hardly any attention to the actual murder--everybody's too busy vocal training, having meetings, emoting, gossipping or--grr!--changing their darling clothes to make room for any serious plot. There was a lot of entertaining talk, but no suspense whatsoever, and the murder weapon was so boring it was downright nerdy. Sam Jones dissappointed me...she's likeable enough, gets off some sarcastic lines, but she doesn't do any thinking or detecting. She's just kind of...there. In her ever-changing clothes. And the last line of the book, which was apparently supposed to be a witty zinger, just left me thinking: "...Huh?" Maybe it's some obscure double-entendre, but it feels like Henderson just didn't know how to end the book.

   Overall, I would have liked more parody or more horror, or both, for Sam Jones to get her hands dirty with more than steel filings, and for most of the silly actors in theis book to rent a brain.

   And I dare Ms. Henderson to write a book set in a nudist colony.




5. The best! Makes you want to buy a blender and start making your own margaritas and party til the morning time!

No comments about Sabrix certified on Oracle9i Application Server.: An article from: Federal Computer Market Report.

No comments about Frontiers of Supercomputing II: A National Reassessment (Los Alamos Series in Basic and Applied Sciences).

No comments about Competition and Cooperation in Taiwan's Information Technology Industry: Inter-firm Networks and Industrial Upgrading.

5 comments about High Performance Oracle8 SQL Programming and Tuning.

1. Pete Cassidy has written the most detailed Oracle Tuning book ever. He includes timings and Explain Plans for queries using a 1-million row table. He places all of the new Oracle8 enhancements in the last two chapters. I highly recommend this book to anyone who ever writes Oracle SQL statements. Great job Pete!



2. I especially like this book because of the real world examples. Pete has taken the time to run many tuning examples. Other tuning books that I have read have few real examples. The section on Analyzing Tables is excellent!



3. I've been programming with Oracle for two and a half years now. I felt that a "High Performance" programming book might be able to help me out, so I opted for this book. While some of the suggestions are helpful, I don't find most of them to be all that special. The basic concept of the book is, "use Explain Plan" (ie tune your code) and "Use indexes when you can" - Oooh ! That's insightful!

   Much of the book is wasted space with the author showing the various permutations of his explain plan output. Four sentences of programming suggestions, followed by two pages of output, doesn't make for particularly interesting reading in my world.

   Granted, the book gives you more, and in better layout than most Oracle texts out there, but I guess I was hoping for more.




4. I have other tuning references, but this is my favorite. The real-life examples and results have saved me hours of frustration. I especially like the chapter on EXPLAIN PLAN, which contains an excellent explaination of the results. I highly recommend it to other DBA's/Developer's.



5. If you want to learn SQL tuning this is not hte book. I guess the author has just filled the book. All, I learned in the end is use indexes (OK!!!). Using indexes is only one part of SQL tuning. There are other issues which have not been explored at all. It is a sheer waste of money to buy this book. I would rather recommend other fine books by Oracle Press and Prentice Hall on Tuning. Bottomline, Dont buy this book. I would have given it a Zero Star if one was available. It was a waste of my money.

5 comments about Oracle 8i and Java: From Client Server to E-Commerce.

1. Excellent book for the beginner to the advanced. Content covers everything you need to know about the Oracle Java environment. Great easy to follow examples that reflect real world solutions.

   I thoroughly recommend this book to any who wants to further their knowledge in the Oracle-Java world.

   A superb reference guide.




2. It is clear that a lot of work went into this book, however, inspite of the large number of pages in the book, it is not very useful. Maybe about 10% of the book has some good tips but the rest is simply out of Oracle education courses. I wish the authors had given some real-world example instead of showing some simple techniques that are fun to know but not really useful on a daily basis.



3. This book contains numerous typos, and such bad layout of the examples it is very hard to follow. The "<>" typo on p321 is an extremely bad demonstration of this. It seems to have missed one last cycle of proof-reading and editorial fix-ups before it went to press.

   But onto the contents... the authors have really taken on a huge task in trying to document the Oracle PL/SQL world and the java world in one book. Since it doesn't assume the reader knows either world in depth all the examples and comments must be kept simple and therefore are of limited use. It starts off with an overview of each topic, and builds on this very slowly. Chapter 20 "Using Oracle Replication to Build Distributed Systems" should be removed completely. This is a very complex topic and the chapter only discusses Read-only snapshot views. No mention of Advance Replication, or the problems these forms of replication can cause in a database. Barely touching on these topics in this way is worse than not including this chapter at all.

   The scope of what this book tries to cover is so large, but it still feels as though it has been filled out to make it fat and expensive. The 1000+ pages are paded out with the badly laid out source code of trivial examples. This book is at best an introduction on how Java relates with Oracle databases, I certainly don't think it is value for money. I advise searching for a better option in order to learn how best to interface these 2 worlds.




4. This book is full of error, even in the code listings! did the authors actaully compile and run the examples? it is very obivious that most of the materials are copied, pasted then rearranged from
   somewhere else. it is also wordy, boring and misleading starting from charpter one! Its only use I can think of would be a door stopper due to its thickness and weight.



5. The first section start with a quick intro to data modeling and general SQL/Oracle syntax. Mid section's focus is on Java data conduits to Oracle (JDBC, SQLJ, etc.). The last part of the book covers a broad range of technologies from IDEs to enterprise components. If you're a Oracle beginner with some java background this book may be of use. The authors cover the material in short succinct snippets. This also benefits middle tier developers - between beginners and experts. For them, this book can be a very useful reference for frequent lookups.

1 comments about Oracle8i and Microsoft SQL Server Integration (With CD-ROM).

1. This book examines the most recent verions of Oracle 8i and sql server and compares one with the other in a non-biased way. Features of both are examined and explained. Microsoft has engineered Sql server with a particular strategy in mind argues the author. This strategy is integration with all the other Microsoft products. Oracle in contrast has the strategy of integrating everything into its core database product. The most useful information in this book are the descriptions of the integration tools to move database schema info and data between the two environments. Sql server has something called DTS, while Oracle has the Oracle migration workbench. However, there are several other tools some of which use OLE DB and ODBC which all support movement of data and sometimes schema information. The author doesn't try to judge which database is better or more open. The information about connectivity between these databases is presented objectively. Anybody that operates in an environment of sql server and Oracle will benefit from this face off between the latest versions of these databases.