Customer Reviews

Oracle Database Administration: The Essential Refe: The Essential Reference

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

I really don't understand where some of the other comments on this book come from - I find it to contain lots of information I need, and I've been a DBA for 10 years. The source material of all Oracle books is ultimately the documentation, but these guys seem to have done a very good job of extracting what we need from the docs and presenting it in a useful form. The title is "Reference", so of course it will duplicate some Oracle material. To me, it looks like the init.ora chapter is pretty close to the docs, but they did cut out some unecessary words, and I'm not sure I could write those (boring) descriptions any better than Oracle already did, so why take a chance on introducing new errors? I think the book deserves 5 stars and the reviews that rate it low don't understand its purpose or have unrealistic expectations.

This book serves it purpose very well. As the title says, it is an essential reference, and that is exactly what I use it for.

As some other reviewers point out, there is a lot of copy-and-paste work in it. But I think that is not a problem.

In fact, very often it is much practical than navigating the bulk of on-line books, when you have to wait for the browser to load, search for a word or topic, or even when there's no computer at hand. Not to mention I can carry it around in my bag when necessary.

I especially would like to emphasize the coverage of SQL commands, init.ora parameters, data dictionary views and utilities.

Although I agree there are some inconsistent topics in this book and some mistakes as well, I think the people who complain about it either expected something very different or did not understand how useful it can be.

In this one book, the authors have distilled at least five Oracle manuals. Want SQL*Plus syntax? It's here. SQL syntax in a concise layout? Here. Every init parameter, descriptions of the various tools DBA's use most, plus a great summary of Oracle starting with an overview, all the way through installation, tuning, backup, and security. The list of steps for creating a new database is wonderful for new DBA's who's primary experience in this area is probably the Oracle course. As a new DBA, this one book will save me lots of time looking through PDF files of Oracle documentation. A great find - this book you'll pry from my cold dead fingers!

I can not believe that a good database administration book could give Oracle Enterprise Manager only two pages (page 173 to 174) plus three line on page 172.

We r trying to upgrade from 8.0.5 to 8.1.5 and this book was not helpful. It contains hundreds of pages copied directly from the Oracle 8.0 documentation which we already had. Usually the copied text is changed very slightly like adding or removing commas. For some reason the recommendations Oracle gives are not always copied into the book so sometimes you r left with explanations from Oracle without the matching recommendation.

Hopefully the authors will post corrections somewhere. They've managed to copy in some of Oracle's errors as well as adding in their own like calling CTXSYS a "demo account". They should try dropping it and seeing how their context applications start failing. Bottom line this isn't essential it's sometimes wrong and for r upgrade it wasn't even helpful.

this book could be obtained much more cheaply by consulting the oracle doc set. the authors get 1 star for the book and 4 stars for their mastery of cut and paste and word processing

Nowadays countless books are blamed for duplicating manuals. UNIX books copy man pages, Java books list JAVA APIs and Oracle books lump together Oracle manuals. Most readers feel uncomfortable buying such books. Others question what alternative there is. Here's the alternative. Let's say you want to talk about vmstat in a UNIX system admin book. You can say "the w column under procs should always be 0 otherwise...". Or in an Oracle book "in reality, some people set pctincrease to 1 just for the purpose of coalescing extents; some argue it's unnecessary because... Our opinion is...". I guarantee these words won't show up in manuals. But these words "The following section talks about...", "This chapter will discuss..." are typically used in product documentation.

This book apparently is overly verbose in uttering what is obvious to every junior DBA. What's not obvious is not obvious to them either. Take "SQL queries to monitor SGA utilization" (Chapter 6) as an example. The authors stopped when they need to talk about what the columns in those views mean (even if we can find this information in manuals) and what kind of values count as warnings to DBAs (this info is not likely in manuals). Whatever computer book you write, if you list the source code, you have the responsibility to talk about the code, at least the hard part of it. If you think that's going to make the book too big and that content should go to a Tuning book, well, there's already so much fat, i.e. verbose talk on easy things. If a big portion of your book is free somewhere, lower the price. There're some good books falling into this category such as Java in a Nutshell, VB&VBA in a Nutshell. But those books are also full of author's wisdom and tips accumulated over the years. How can this book compare?

Beside the fact the book is made from Oracle documentation (thanks God for cut-and-paste), which is by the way available on their web site for free, this book may be suitable for very junior DBAs. There is almost nothing inside which can be used in real DBA's life - explanations are too shallow and few available scripts can't help much. So, if you are experienced DBA or doing some serious work with Oracle, this book can't help. I have six O'Reily's book (Oracle) and this one is far bellow quality of the others.

I really expected much more than this from O'Reilly. Almost half of the book is just cut-and-pasted in from the Oracle online documentation (which is available free online!)! Oracle should be getting half the royalties, or the book should cost 50% less. Plus, it doesn't cover 8i so its coverage of Oracle8 topics is incomplete and incorrect. I can't believe this is the best these authors and O'Reilly can do. I rate it 0 stars and plan to send my copy to O'Reilly with comments.

I am a Sybase DBA and I found this book very useful in terms of knowledge and information. This book is perfect! Don't listen to the other reviewers saying not so good things about this book. They should have read the back cover before they buying it!