Oracle Applications DBA Field Guide (Expert's Voice in Oracle) (Paperback)

by Paul Jackson (Author), Elke Phelps (Author)
Key Phrases: application context file, adpatch session, adpatch utility, E-Business Suite, Concurrent Manager, Oracle Support (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Administrators and managers as well as more advanced users will find plenty of hard facts for administering Oracle Applications in a work environment, but it's also quite portable and not the weighty tome you'd expect from such a survey.

— Midwest Book Review, California Bookwatch

Oracle Applications DBA Field Guide provides scripts, notes, guidelines, and references to guide you safely through the crucial day-to-day administration tasks that fall within your jurisdiction. This includes configuring, monitoring, performance tuning, troubleshooting, and patching. This book contains tips, techniques, and guidance for administering the highly complex Oracle E-Business Suite running Oracle9i or Oracle10g on UNIX or Linux serversall in an easy reading and quick-to-navigate format.

Even for the experienced database administrator, Oracle Applications are complicated to administer, and most other documentation out there is difficult to find and understand. Whether you're an experienced Oracle Applications DBA or a relative newcomer to Oracle 11i Applications (perhaps migrating from PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, or Siebel), this book will enable you to make a real impact on the ease and efficiency of your day-to-day administrative tasks, and will be relevant for Oracle Applications Release 12 and Fusion.

About the Author
Paul Jackson has over 10 years' experience as a developer and Oracle DBA. Paul is the Program Director for the ATS SIG. He is a very active member of the Oracle community through memberships of Ohio Valley Oracle Applications User Group (OVOAUG), International Oracle User Group (IOUG), and the Oracle RAC SIG.

Elke Phelps is an Oracle Certified Professional with over 12 years' experience administering Oracle products. She is the Founder and presiding President of the Oracle Applications User Group's Middleware SIG&emdash;formerly the ATS SIG&emdash;and is responsible for conducting meetings at the annual OAUG and Oracle Open World conferences. This yields a unique medium for access to the Oracle Applications users and provides name recognition in the user community. Elke is the author of several whitepapers and is a technical presenter at many international conferences.

Product Details

• Paperback: 264 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (March 31, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590596447
• ISBN-13: 978-1590596449
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.3 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #462,869 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Read for many levels of Oracle Apps DBA's, May 2, 2006

By	Lon White - AZOAUG - See all my reviews

There are relatively few books that have been published for DBA's that run the 11i Oracle Applications. Well, now we have a good one for our bookshelves... This book was an easy read and kept me engaged throughout the various topics. I especially appreciated the specific metalink note references within the chapters which allowed me to gather more detailed information straight from Oracle. DBA's that have been involved with the Oracle Apps for awhile will get a refresher to things they may have learned and forgotten over the years as well as getting a solid explanation of the newer features for 11i; while newer DBA's with get well written explanations of the componentry needed to run the Apps. This book can also be a great desk reference for those quick "... how does that work..." questions. I would highly recommend this book to anyone wanting to learn more about the Apps DBA job.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Great nuts & bolts handbook, October 26, 2006

By	Sean P. Hull "Oracle, MySQL, tuning, high ava... (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

A lot of folks, when they talk about tech books, start right in with details, correctness, and comments on depth and so on. I'd like to tell you that this book is an enjoyable read. Phelps and Jackson are good writers, and they breakdown concepts and details into an easy to use handbook or "field guide".

As I move into more Applications implementations, I have found this book to be indispensible for day-to-day answers.

What do I like? The book is organized well, with nice coverage of a diverse suite of software. It offers suggestions like clearing the JAR cache, purging concurrent requests, and workflow history, and so on. What I also really like is it has an excellent chapter on both what to monitor, and complete scripts to do it with. In the database, those include listener, logfiles, db up/down, idle sessions, long running sessions, high active sessions, blocking sessions, tablespace usage, extent issues & profile changes. Also scripts to monitor apache, jvm, forms, concurrent manager, OS cpu & load average are included.

I have a couple of small caveats as well. If you're a real newbie to Oracle Apps + Oracle in general, this is probably not the book for you. Also although there is some coverage of Unix in chapter 6 toolkit, I'd say if you're not strong with Unix already, this chapter won't help much. Also chapter 7 resources, was a bit of a letdown. They mention IOUG, OAUG as organizations, and related conferences, and Oracle's own site and a couple of others, but there are tons of blogs out there, and I would have liked to be pointed to the ones the authors recommend or favor most. Also the book list recommendations are decent, but mostly in the Oracle Database arena, and since I'm already an accomplished DBA, I have all those books! Also the Performance chapter mentions hitratios, which is almost considered taboo in the Oracle world these days, and didn't get into more depth with the Wait Interface and so on.

In summary I really enjoy this book for it's great writing style, quick coverage, best practices, and troubleshooting recommendations. The only thing I'd say as a reservation is, when it comes to more in depth performance tuning of the db, there are other books that can give you a more detail and specifics.

Enjoy!

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Excellent Resource, May 23, 2006

By	Norman Leach (Jeffersonville, IN United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This is the type of book I was looking for when I entered the Oracle Apps DBA field 2 years ago. Anyone who has used MetaLink to find this information knows that, at times, it can be difficult to find all the information you need. Often, you have to read through multiple notes and combine pieces of information from each of them to find your answer. Phelps and Jackson have done an excellent job of bringing together much of the essential information an Apps DBA needs to perform his/her duties.

The chapters on monitoring and tuning were especially helpful. These chapters stress the importance of proactive monitoring to head off potential issues, and give examples of what to monitor as well as scripts that can be used to perform the monitoring.
And, as the above reviewer stated, I have turned to this book multiple times as a quick "How does that work/Where is that file" resource.

I strongly recommend this book for anyone who is new to this field; had this book been out 2 years ago, my learning curve would have been much shallower. I also believe that those with years of experience in this field will benefit from the depth and conciseness of the information in the Orale Applications DBA Field Guide.

Phelps and Jackson are both well respected in their field, and this book shows why.