Customer Reviews

DB2 for Solaris: The Official Guide (IBM Press Series--Information Management)

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Tom and Mark have done an excellent job at covering new V8 features and Solaris internals. This book combines DB2 and Solaris implementation details and is a must for Solaris SAs and DB2 DBAs supporting DB2 on Solaris. They have aptly pointed out the unique DB2 on Solaris differences that you need to know to get the best performance out of DB2 on Solaris (Kernel asynchronous I/O, double buffering, disk architecture, concurrent I/O, performance of raw devices,VCS, Quick I/O, Cached Quick I/O, address space diagrams and details on memory management by the MMU). By adding the additional details on Solaris in Chapters 11 - 15, the authors have made the book a handy reference.

This book consolidates an abunance of hints, tips and techniques learned by Mark and Tom from years of working with DB2 on Solaris. Since Mark Wilding is a key developer of DB2 on Solaris and Tom has been working in the field with customers using DB2 on Solaris, you could not ask for a better combination.
They both have been very helpful to me and I found their book enlightening. Also, it is a great training tool for our new people not familiar with Solaris and DB2.

This is a must read for anyone using Solaris and Unix, not just DB2 for Solaris. The first half of the book focuses on DB2 for Solaris, and the second half dives deep into Solaris internals and principles. Much of the information documented here is difficult to find anywhere and is highly recommended for anyone who wants to know how key aspects of a Unix operating system ticks. I particularly like sections like "Life and Times of a Load Instruction", "Memory Map and Address Space", and "Simple/Advanced Network Debugging". An excellent reference worthy of being on the same shelf as Richard Stevens' Unix classics!

Having been a DBA for 2 decades I remember the 80s and 90s when it was nearly impossible to find reference books stocked with the kind of information covered here. This book blends DB2 UDB product knowledge specific for the Solaris platform with deep Solaris platform knowledge. Written in a how-to fashion, it is unique to find this product/platform combination. Most books written by IBMers are non-platform specific IBM software focused, or IBM software on IBM hardware focused. Similarly, most books published by Sun cover multiple vendor software brands (DB2, Oracle, Sybase) at a much higher level, or go much deeper into a topic, but cover Oracle only. As one might expect, the real DB2 on Solaris knowledge expressed here is authored by guys paid to develop the software on Solaris and paid to sell the software on Solaris...you won't find it anywhere else.

IMHO, this book contains no real content. There is no real tips or even useful best practices.

The book is just a summary of other peoples works. The first 200 pages is nothing more than a summary of the Administration Guide, followed by summaries of Veritas and Sun clustering manuals with a closing on Adrian's Solaris Performance guide. You are better off grabbing the real books themselves.

Not that summaries are bad if it was done with the intent of providing a useful reference followed up with comments on why certain things should or should not be done. The Author provided none of that. They offer no real insights on DB2 nor Solaris.