Customer Reviews

Creating a Self-Tuning Oracle Database: Automating Oracle9i Dynamic SGA Performance (Oracle In-Focus series)

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Don Burleson has his name on more Oracle books than (I believe) any other author. However, many other experts on the Oracle database spend a significant portion of their time debunking errors and misinformation that he disseminates in articles and books like these. [...] where a search for "Burleson" will turn up several articles which point out inaccuracies in his articles or statements.

The majority of the information in this book, while looking impressive, is actually so much fluff. A majority of it will either do nothing for performance or make performance worse. Yes, on some systems, some of the suggestions may improve performance, but there is not enough information provided to show you where or when which changes will make which improvements.

Here is an interesting section:

- Plotting the Data Buffer Hit Ratio by Hour of the Day

Isn't that nice. I can graph my buffer hit ratio by hour by day. That is going to help me a lot! The author is still stuck in the ratio mindset and doesn't seem to truly understand how the Oracle SGA actually works. Doesn't show it to the reader anyways.

Statspack is a Godsend tool from Oracle, and this book goes even further than 10g.

This and the previous edition of the book provide DBAs with an excellent introduction into understanding statspack internal tables and great ideas on how to integrate critically important OS statistics into the statspack data gathering process to a self tuning database.

I found this book and the WISE Oracle tool to be invaluable tools that extend statspack capabilities and help to resolve complex performance problems.

This book is another insightful guide from the master of Oracle database tuning, Donald Burleson. Readers will no doubt recall that Mr. Burleson wrote the Oracle best sellers, "Oracle High-Performance SQL Tuning" and Oracle High-Performance Tuning with Statspack." Mr. Burleson brings the same level of expertise to this new series of books published by "Rampant Techpress."

This volume unravels the mysteries of the various database caches and pools in the 9i database. Are you confused about the different pools and database caches that have been introduced in recent years? Do you know what the difference is between the "Keep Pool" and the "Recycle Pool" ? Okay, how about this: How many buffer caches are there-7 or 8 ? Where should you put your indexes-in the cache with the largest block size, or the smallest?

I confess that I have found it difficult to keep up with the myriad cache and pool changes that Oracle has introduced in recent years. I suspect that other DBAs also find it challenging. These issues are all addressed in this book, with extensive examples and scripts, so that readers can try it for themselves. There are a total of 29 useful scripts that are provided with this book (I successfully downloaded them from the Rampant web site).

I found the section, "Internals of the Oracle Data Buffers" particular interesting. It explains the difference between the pre-Oracle 9i buffering system and the new "touch count" method used in 9i. In this section, the script "Buf_Blocks.sql" is really amazing. It lists in tabular format the exact distribution of objects in the data buffers, sorted by buffer pool. Using this script, you can see which pool your indexes or tables have been assigned.

Beware! This book isn't filled with "fluff" or some theoretical treatises dreamed up by academians. This is a book BY AND FOR PRACTICING DBAS. The focus in the book is on PROACTIVELY improving database performance. If you are a "Hands on" DBA interested in getting the best performance from your system, then you will find this book very helpful.

I was very impressed by the Plain English renditions in this book. It is high structured and wekk organized with scripts to illustrate each concept. It is very useful for multiple blocks in Oracle9i and concise and informative.

The only fault is that it assumes a working DBA knowledge, but the scripts help make-up for the deficiency.

The book is everything the other reviewers have already said. The author surely knows what he is writing and the book contains lot of useful information on the inner workings of SGA and how to fine tune it.

One caveat, the author deliberately leaves out the details on the STATSPACK so he can sell you an ANOTHER book on STATSPACK which he also wrote. I found this little annoying since STATSPACK is the primary utility to monitor SGA, and hence, I felt it should have been covered in complete detail instead of just a glimpse in order to sell an another book.

This was very enjoyable read and I'm very happy to see that many of the details about using the Oracle9i dynamic SGA are revealed. The problem has always been that the Oracle documentation tells you about the new features yet fail to tell you about how to apply them.

After reading this book I was able to understand the automatic-tuning methods in Oracle10g and they made sense because the author revealed some of the mechanisms that they use. The online scripts are very nice also, with many I had never seen before.

Even though much of the content is over my head, the concepts are facinating and helped me to understand the Oracle10g self-tuning features. The scripts all ran flawlessly, and saved me from knowing the detail about the Oracle internals. I can read the concept, run the script, and see how the results measure up on my system.