Customer Reviews

Oracle Real Application Clusters

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

This is a complete reference that provides 100% business value to professionals using or moving to RAC.

We have already used many of his scripts over the last two weeks in our test environment and has helped us move forward considerably. His internals chapter is excellent. Good work Murali. I highly recommend this book

This book has depth; the contents are full of meat. In these pages is something for everyone. Murali discusses RAC starting with the single instance and covers clustering, it covers internals to a great detail.

Installation and Performance tuning chapters are no exception. Author focus has been Oracle while touching on Linux and Windows installation.

The book presents the topic in a clear and concise fashion.

This is a great book, a must have for a DBA working on RAC. This is one of the two best books purchased by me this year. The other book is the book by Cary Millsap.

Excellent A-Z coverage of Oracle with respect to RAC. Covers all features single instance, cluster configurations, best practices etc in great detail.

Performance tuning chapter is well explained, the author is on the right track, he discourages the use of ratio for tuning and encourages using a scientific method for tuning the system. He explains using STATSPACK,Wait Interface and Events to track down the cause of the problem.

This is an excellent buy.

I found this book very helpful and I love this one. Murali has done an excellent work in providing all the RAC related information starting with the Oracle concepts before moving to the clustering part. The hardware concepts chapter covers in great detail the various components that play important role when configuring RAC clusters, interconnects, storage systems etc,

The architecture and transaction management chapters have such a good wealth of information that is helpful in understanding the behavior of RAC, while I have not found an immediate need for these internals, it makes you understand what happens behind the scene which I think will help when you encounter any problems or when you start trouble shooting your RAC environment.

TAF and performance tuning chapters are also very well discussed. The author ends with providing some helping hints for problem diagnostics.

I recommend this book to anyone starting to use or currently using RAC.

This is an excellent book, covers RAC north south east and west. Internals are covered in great detail. I have not found any other book that has such details.

The real good thing about this book is that the author provides examples with dumps and explains them so you understand and don't have to take the author for granted. You can see and understand from the examples.

TAF is covered in great detail. From the mechanics to using them inside Java code for complete transparent failover is covered with examples.

I also liked the performance tuning chapters, the author has taken all angles into consideration while writing these 3 chapters. By providing extensive descriptions and a several scripts the author has impressed me. We at our company have used several of his scripts and found helpful.

The support chapters are excellent.

This book is great, it has an excellent coverage of all features of RAC, starting with a single instance, covers RAC architecture its internals, Cache fusion behavior, internals of various recovery scenarios, TAF, TAF using Java with examples, performance tuning etc. It's an complete book on RAC.

The good thing about this book is it covers all the internals and discussions with illustrations such as outputs from file dumps and trace files. The book is very well organized, in various sections and flows pretty well (Concepts - Architecture - Administration). The only confusion is with the installation of cluster file system and cluster manager are covered in the end, the author should have included it with the other sections.

I wish there was a CD /disk included with the various scripts.

Truly a great buy everyone!

I found this book very helpful and I love this one. Murali has done an excellent work in providing all the RAC related information starting with the Oracle concepts before moving to the clustering part. The hardware concepts chapter covers in great details the various components that play an important role when configuring RAC clusters, interconnects, storage systems etc,

The architecture and transaction management chapters have such a good wealth of information that is helpful in understanding the behavior of RAC, while I have not found an immediate need for these internals, it makes you understand what happens behind the scene which I think will help when you encounter any problems or when you start trouble shooting your RAC environment.

TAF and performance tuning chapters are also very well discussed. The author ends with providing some helping hints for problem diagnostics.

I recommend this book to anyone starting to use or currently using RAC.

This is my second review for this book. I don't know why others have not liked this book. This book in our opinion is really excellent. Everyone of us at our company loves this book. Actually we purchased 10 copies of this book for our DBA's, Architects and Managers

Check out my detail review on this book, this is truely an A-Z book on RAC covers Oracle concepts, clustering and internals of RAC.

The book covers a great detail of Oracle technology. Having worked with RAC since its first release. I think the author has taken great efforts to start with the basic concepts and drive from the basic Oracle concepts into the clustering technology to make it a complete comprehensive book. I wish I had this book when I first started into RAC, don't get me wrong even after 3 years of working with RAC I find this book very useful. Here is a recap for the benefit of other readers.

Chapter 2 covers the various hardware technologies available, the SMP architecture, SMP clustering, storage subsystems and the various types of cluster interconnects. A good comprehensive coverage of the hardware concepts on what is there and what to look forward to in areas of high speed interconnects.

Chapter 3 covers Oracle concepts. I think this was a good presentation of Oracle technology especially because RAC is nothing but a combination of many single instances. This is probably the only chapter that is exclusively dedicated to Oracle single instance concepts. In this chapter the author has analyzed Oracle file and memory dumps to explain the concepts.

Chapter 4 covers the RAC architecture, pretty detailed in-depth coverage, starting with the lock structures in RAC with the various background and foreground processes are covered in detail. Detailed discussion on the functions of GRD, GCS and GES, which are the backbones in a RAC architecture

Chapter 5 covers transaction management and behavior. The author has explained in detail the various transaction scenarios not neglecting the fact on how transitions are managed in a single instance configuration and covering areas that any developer/administrator should keep watch for when writing SQL statements to perform. This chapter has a great detail of fine tooth analysis.

Chapter 6 covers parallel processing. This is the only chapter that I wish the author had provided more details. I wish he had provided some more in-depth details into parallel processing across instances without sacrificing details of parallel processing within an instance.

Chapter 7 covers design considerations for RAC. The chapter discusses various database features that should be considered while designing for RAC not to mention that these features with the RAC technology will provide higher scalability. Apart from the index considerations, partitioning options the new sorted hash cluster feature coming in 10g has also been discussed.

Chapter 8 Installation and configuration, the chapter was very helpful. I was able to give this book to a Junior DBA and based on the information contained in this chapter and Chapter 16 he was able to get a step by step jumpstart into the installation and configuration of RAC. The great thing about the entire book is its written in simple readable English

Chapter 10 Availability and Scalability. It is an outstanding chapter. Provides details on how Oracle fails over, the various steps are analyzed and explained. These explanations are followed by various examples of the tnsnames configuration, usage of JDBC thick and thin drivers including detailed JAVA code that was helpful to the development team.

Chapter 12. Backup and recovery, the most important thing about this chapter that I found useful was the details covered in the recovery scenarios from various types of failures in a RAC environment. All scenarios are explained using trace file outputs and flow charts.

Chapter 13, 14 and 15 cover performance tuning. These chapters cover tools, utilities, tuning a single instance and tuning the clustered database. The author is rightly stated that tuning a RAC environment starts with tuning a single instance, I can relate back to our experience when installing and configuring RAC. I benefited from the enormous amount of scripts and data that the author has used to explain the wait interface and events interface available from Oracle. I wish a CD or disk was included. While some of these tools and utilities are covered in other books also, it was good to see all in a single place.

Chapter 16 covers cluster installation and configuration steps for Linux and a Windows environment.

Overall I think this is an excellent book. I would definitely recommend this book for anyone getting into the RAC technology. While the book has only a few features and blurbs covering Oracle 10g, with 10g in Beta I should not have expected more details. I would love to see another detailed book on RAC covering just 10g by the same author.

I have had this book for over a month now. This book is out of the ordinary, contains excellent coverage. My visit to amazon.com was to add a few lines of my experience for the benefit of other readers. To my surprise I see quite of few criticisms regarding the details of STATSPACK mentioned in this book. I am not sure how these readers tune their databases. Based on the old ratio technology, using a method of hit or miss lets try this or lets try increasing this parameter approach? In my opinion STATSPACK is a critical piece in today's database tuning, provides a great detail of insight into the performance of the database. I found no negativity to this being included in this book; rather the author has taken a positive approach to explain the wait events related to RAC from the STATSPACK generated statistics.

The book explains STATSPACK in a concise manner compared to other books on the same subject that I have.

There is more than just STATSPACK, Oracle Wait interface, usage of events to tune SQL statements and my favorite part, contains lots of queries/scripts.

I liked the author's style; he introduces the tools and utilities such as STATSPACK, OEM, Oracle's wait interface and Oracle's Event Interface (chapter 13) which is good for beginners, he then explains on using them to tune the single instance (chapter 14) and rightly emphasis that only after the single instance is tuned should one move towards tuning the cluster (chapter 15). There is more detailed review on this book by S.Chen which I agree with.

In my opinion RAC is a very sophisticated product, a clustered database which comprises of many single instances and the author has done a splendid job in bringing together all its internals and beyond in this book. While the technical part of the book is good, it does have some typos and grammatical errors. Which book doesn't.

Overall it's a great buy!