Customer Reviews

Oracle 24x7 Tips and Techniques

5 star:		(24)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I have been an Oracle DBA for nearly 14 years and I read nearly all of the new books published on the subject. This book is the best I have read in years.

Even if you aren't striving to achieve true 24 x 7 operation, the configuration and performance tips alone are better than most of the advanced tuning books on the market today.

The author covers every major topic important to an Oracle DBA in great detail. He includes information that I have not found in any other source. The table of contents does not begin to describe the depth of information contained within the pages of the book.

The author also gives you the benefit of his real world field experience, describing what works, what does'nt, and why. He even provides case studies which guide the reader step-by-step through the process.

Have you ever wondered how to perform an Oracle upgrade or patch installation with little or no down time? Want to pinpoint which indexes need rebuilding instead of guessing? Want to be able to identify exactly which latch or enqueue is causing the trouble? Want to double or triple your income by becoming the smartest DBA on the block? Read this book.

In today's world of "write a book in a month for the money", so many self-proclaimed "technical authors" seem to be making hay reengineering the user manuals. This book comes across as a refreshing change. The author claims to have spent a year writing it. And this time appears to have been really well spent. The book is meticulously researched and extremely well written. The topics covered are built well on top on one another. Each chapter is crucial in learning to maintain complete database uptime. At the same time, any individual chapter can be separately read. The first chapter that caught my fancy was chapter 13 (Interpreting the alert log and trace files). It dissects the alert log and systematically presents information that I have never seen before. examples: newer tracing options, tracing of PL/SQL code by dumping PL/SQL buffers, tracing ongoing sessions, detailed analysis of internal errors, etc. etc. Another real winner is chapter 14 on corruption. It provides end to end coverage on corruption. Every issue that comes to mind (and more) is presented there. The author has just not taken an Oracle-centric approach. He has gone behind the Oracle scenes and talks in detail about hardware, operating systems, and even the mysterious network. Information on triple mirroring and third-party replication such as EMC geo mirroring is unprecedented. My sincere advice: get your hands on this book.

Excellent book. This is the fiirst book I have seen from Oracle Press that goes byond the usual fluff. The author has somehow managed to provide vast breadth and incridible depth in several areas. Very impressive. One important aspect I found was, the focus is not just on availability, as the title might indicate. The author has given equal importance to performance, as well. Also, in several areas he/she has provided detailed info on how Oracle works internally, which is very useful for both developers and DBAs. Especially for folks like me, who do a bit of both. For example, I have not seen before ANY other book talk about such buffer cache and shared-pool internals, comprehensve methods to enhance DBWR performance, physical aspects of bitmap indexes and related advise, available but previously undocumented tracing options, several hardware architectures, detailed NETWORK/OS tuning, etc. etc. etc. I could go on and on. I have just spend the last two weeks reading this book and still have quite a way to go. However from what I have seen this has been a great investment. I will look for more books from tuis author.

I cannot begin to say how much this book has helped me. The author has dispensed with the theoretical dribble that you find in most books and given us a hands-on manual of how to administer an Oracle database from the ground up. I've just come to a 24x7 environment, so I bought this book thinking it would just help me with tuning, backup & recovery and a few other facets of the job, but after reading it, I feel confident that I could handle any type of Oracle assignment, from the capacity planning stage all the way through to production. It's that comprehensive folks, and it's written in a style that keeps you interested. He doesn't just tell you what to do, he tells you why and he tells you what to expect if you don't. I don't care what type of environment you're running, this book will help you be a better DBA and will keep you home where you belong on the weekends. Stop reading and put it in your shopping cart.

A good way to judge a technical book is to turn to a section on a subject that you already understand, and see if the author knows his stuff. If he does a good job on that section, you can hope he's doing a good job elsewhere.

I know enough about Oracle databases to say, this guy REALLY knows his stuff. His first chapter is on Service Level Agreements -- which is exactly the right starting point for anyone who really wants to manage the uptime of a database. After that, it keeps getting better. In three chapters I had enough to both vindicate many of my own beliefs and to call up a former client with a recommended change to the INIT.ORA I'd left them with.

Wonderful book. More Oracle books should be this good.

-Tom

This book provides a wealth of information to both the information manager and database administrator. First inspection leads one to feel there is too much technical details for the information manager and not enough for the database administrator. However, any text of this small size (just over 1000 pages) could not possibly provide all the information needed by both categories of readers.

There do appear to be a few statements in the text which conflict with Oracle's support site as well as my personal experiences. For example, on page 119 the author states that Oracle Multi-Threaded Server is not available on the Windows NT platform. While this is true for the older Oracle 7.x Server, it is not true for the Oracle 8i line of database servers which were the standard at the time the book went to press (as the book was copyrighted in year 2000 and I have been usign 8i since 1998.)

On the whole I have found this book to be a worthwhile addition to my technical library and recommend it to fellow Amazonians.

I have been an Oracle DBA for 7 years and this is about the best book that I have come across.

The most amazing thing is that Venkat makes this readable. Usually, when a book or manual has this wealth of technical detail, it puts me to sleep in a couple of pages.

This book has the details that you would only get out of a whole bookshelf of Oracle manuals, but you can read thru entire chapters without drifting off.

Vankat has an interesting position, that performance is fundamentally tied to high availability. So, a lot of this book provides tips on how to improve performance.

My only gripe is that the title is a bit mis-leading - the subtitle of 'Real-world Approaches to Ensuring Database Availability' is a much more accurate description than 'Oracle 24x7'.

I am really impressed by the content in this book, the author has documented a ton of real-world experiences here; for example not only are suggestions and solutions well presented, but also the politics and repercussions of recommending and implementing 24x7 solutions. I am finding this book a complete read from front to back and plan on implementing many of the techniques suggested.

As a consultant and instructor I have read many Oracle Books and this is clearly the best by far. It is concisely written, clearly communicated and packed with a wealth of knowledge found no where else. A must-have for any serious DBA!

An excellent reference for all professionals desiring to achieve 99.999% uptime with Oracle at the heart of their Mission Critical App. Oracle8 and 8i provide a plethora of features for acheiving such uptime - this book helps put those features to work. Significant information on RAID, stripes, Triple Mirroring amongst others. Although the title says "tips and techniques" - I think it should read from cover to cover. A necessary complement to the Oracle Documentation set.