Oracle Database 10g Real Application Clusters Handbook (Oracle Press) [Paperback]

K Gopalakrishnan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 22, 2006 | ISBN-10: 007146509X | ISBN-13: 978-0071465090 | Edition: 1

Learn cutting-edge technology from Oracle experts

Written by Oracle insiders, this comprehensive guide covers everything you need to know about Real Application Clusters -- low-cost hardware platforms that can rival and exceed the quality of service, availability, and scalability of the most expensive mainframe systems.

• Concepts covered are applicable to all previous versions of Oracle
• Tuning and troubleshooting tips, providing insight on the most advanced diagnostics available
• Detailed coverage of advanced RAC concepts
• Working code for all examples available online

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

Learn to Implement Oracle Real Application Clusters Technology from the Ground Up

Maximize database availability, scalability, and efficiency using Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) and the in-depth information contained in this Oracle Press guide. Oracle Database 10g Real Application Clusters Handbook explains RAC concepts, administration, tuning, and troubleshooting. Inside, you'll learn how to prepare and create Oracle RAC databases and servers, and automate administrative tasks. You'll also get full coverage of cutting-edge Oracle RAC diagnostic tools, backup and recovery procedures, performance tweaks, and custom application design strategies.

• Install, configure, and administer Oracle Database 10g Real Application Clusters
• Use Automatic Storage Management and manage the disk groups
• Administer Oracle RAC databases and instances, and manage the Services voting disk
• Implement workload management, intelligent load balancing, and Transparent Application Failover (TAF)
• Execute RAC backup and recovery operations
• Analyze and tune performance using AWR and AWR reports
• Understand the internals of lock and resource management in RAC
• Troubleshoot Oracle RAC databases with LMON traces, LMD traces, and alert logs
• Design and debug applications that run on Oracle Real Application Clusters

About the Author

K Gopalakrishnan (Gopal) is a senior principal consultant with the Advanced Technology Services group at Oracle Corporation, specializing exclusively in performance tuning, high availability, and disaster recovery. He is a recognized expert in Oracle RAC and Database Internals and has used his extensive expertise in solving many vexing performance issues all across the world for telecom giants, banks, financial institutions, and universities. Gopal has more than a decade of Oracle expertise backed by an engineering degree in computer science and engineering from the University of Madras, India.

Gopal has previously co-authored an award-winning Oracle Press book, Oracle Wait Interface: A Practical Guide to Performance Diagnostics and Tuning. He was awarded an Editor's Choice award for Oracle Author of the Year by Oracle Magazine in 2005. Gopal was also chosen as an Oracle ACE by Oracle Technology Network (http://oracle.com/technology/index.html) in 2006.

Product Details

• Paperback: 421 pages
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media; 1 edition (November 22, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 007146509X
• ISBN-13: 978-0071465090
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #677,000 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Currently Strategic Deployment Specialist with Enterprise Solutions Group in Oracle Corporation. Was Senior Principal Consultant with Oracle System Performance Architecture (Oracle Consulting) on Performance and Availability. Prior to Oracle was an Independent Oracle Performance Consultant based in Bangalore,INDIA.

Gopal has worked with few of the biggest and busiest databases in the planet and has deep experience in the performance management and tuning of very large online transactional databases. One of his core competencies is the design and deployment of online transactional database solution architectures that support performance, high availability, scalability and reliability

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Extremely well written with tremendous in-depth coverage of RAC internals, April 23, 2007

By 

JEFFREY M. HUNTER "Jeffrey M. Hunter" (Butler, PA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Oracle Database 10g Real Application Clusters Handbook (Oracle Press) (Paperback)

By far, the best book I have read on the subject of Oracle10g RAC. Given the success of Gopalakrishnan as coauthor of the book "Oracle Wait Interface: A Practical Guide to Performance Diagnostics & Tuning", I was eager to see his work on a subject as involved as Oracle10g RAC. I am happy to say that Gopal did an outstanding and thorough job! Every chapter of this book is clear and well written with accurate demonstrations and valuable illustrations. This book is for both beginners as well as seasoned Oracle professions.

What I found most useful was the in-depth coverage of Cache Fusion and Global Resource Directory as well as a thorough troubleshooting section. The author also provides extensive coverage on installation and architecture concerns, backup and recovery in RAC, performance monitoring, workload balancing and distribution, connection management, as well as application development and extensions to the RAC architecture. Oracle's Automatic Storage Management (ASM) feature is fully explained as well as many other basic and advanced administration topics.

The only area of improvement I would suggest is greater coverage on backing up and recovering the two key Oracle Clusterware shared components: the Voting Disk and the Oracle Cluster Registry File. Although the book does contain information pertaining to backing up and recovering these resources, I felt that these two files are critical enough to the operation of Oracle Clusterware that a full working example would be helpful. Possibly a workshop that fully details how to recover a voting disk and cluster registry file after the loss of both files.

I would highly recommend this book to DBA's and Developers tasked with working in an Oracle10g RAC environment. You will not be disappointment!

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Title: Deep dive to RAC concepts and Cache Fusion Internals, December 12, 2006

By 

Nandu Konat "Nandu" (Houston, TX USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Oracle Database 10g Real Application Clusters Handbook (Oracle Press) (Paperback)

These days, we find a lot of books on Oracle Technology flooding the market in tandem with the product announcements. Most of the books just rehash the standard (or even beta) documentation, or published metalink notes. This book is certainly does not belong to that category.

First of all, I find that this is the first book which tries to present an accurate picture of RAC. This book clearly demonstrates that RAC is the improved version of OPS and shows the evoluation path of OPS to RAC. I suppose most of the people who have worked on Oracle for a long time will agree with that statement. Most of the current books in the market that I get to read just tend to follow what Oracle marketing says, that RAC is not OPS.

Notably, this is the first ever book on RAC, that has shown me how cache fusion really works. Cache fusion is the secret of RAC and not many people knows how they work under the hood. In this book the author has clearly demonstrated how the resources are mastered, how the locks are coverted and that a row level locks (transaction locks) are different to a buffer locks (Global Cache locks). There are places where the author has used block dumps to explain the internal implementations.

What I see is that the author has tried his best to concentrate on concepts and inner workings of various things inside RAC.

In that sense, this book is well stocked with lengthy discussions for the RAC hungry technicians. the book requires a lot of attention (and sometimes repeated readings) and certainly this is not bed time reading!

The beginning is light and interesting, especially the history of OPS which is difficult to find and collate.I really enjoyed reading the Global Resource Directory chapter along with the Cache Fusion. Many other chapters are worth a mention including the Backup and Recovery, Performance Tuning (No wonder,the author has another best selling oracle performance tuning book!) and Application Development. The consistency and approach is great and the author has tried to keep things in context, most of the times. The author has managed to touch many topics in RAC though some of them could have been lengthier and more conclusive.

One last thing, If you want to buy a book just to get the bunch of day to day commands for RAC and plan to work on RAC, please do not buy this book. You will be thoroughly disappointed as this book doesn't belong to that category. It only tells us how things works internally, what are the concepts behind the scenes and not the magic commands to administer RAC.

As a whole, I find this book a very enriching reference/concepts book to read when I don't know how something works in RAC. If there is a secret in RAC, there is a good chance you might find it in this book rather than any other. Contents in this book are generally not seen in other RAC books that I have read and the quality of presentation is much better.

Good buy but prepare for some heavy reading.!! I recommend this book to every DBA (even architects) who want to know HOW RAC works.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Everything you ever wanted to know about RAC and more....., March 3, 2007

By 

Sebe Kingsview "Sebe" (NY,USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Oracle Database 10g Real Application Clusters Handbook (Oracle Press) (Paperback)

Just got this much expected book from Gopal! Absolutely fantastic...It is certainly very detailed and in-depth was my immediate impression.

Many topics are detailed, exhaustive and to the point. It is different to the other RAC books available in the market and also this book is platform independent. I am very impressed with this one because it is unique and the style of writing is great, not to mention the depth and clarity of the chapters.

I would like to agree with the other person who has commented that we need lot of attention and concentration to read this book. If you have a RAC database, nothing like it to try the example demonstrations provided in the book.

Not everyone will be fortunate to have a 4 node RAC to test the possible cache fusion scenarios explained in this book. But the author has prepared a very effective demonstration to reveal the internal operations of the cache fusion. A lot of topics like internal of resource mastering/remastering, two pass recovery and past images are dealt to the core. Another unique in the book is a discussion on extended RAC (most commonly known as stretch clusters or geo clusters) and discussions on Application development for RAC.

Overall, it is an excellent text on RAC and worth for your investment on Time and money. There are so less books with good quality and content. It is worth the wait and I hope you won't be disappointed.