Customer Reviews

High Performance Oracle8 SQL Programming and Tuning

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book was a major disappointment. It is verbose, poorly oraganized, and contains numerous minor mis-statements. This appears to have been written about ver 7.3 and then a chapter was added to claim to cover ver. 8. Not recommended.

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.

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!

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!

I have read Cassidy's "SQL*Plus cookbook", and I was priviledged to see an advanced copy of this text. The book goes far beyond any other Oracle SQL book, and actually shows the "explain plan" output from the query techniques, so I can quickly see the performance ramifications of the query. Also, the object-oriented section was outstanding! This book is the only one (including the Oracle manuals) that shows SQL internals for objects.

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.

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.