Customer Reviews

Oracle Database 10g New Features: Oracle10g Reference for Advanced Tuning & Administration (Oracle In-Focus series)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I am appalled by the low quality of this book. The writing is weak and the examples are poor. Some features are described for many pages with many very similar examples and others entirely lack examples or explanation. There are plenty of cases when the book directly contradicts itself (p78 the database size is 8 million G in the table and 8 million T in the text; p82 there are 11 platforms in the table but the text says that there are only 9;...) In short, it appears that the book was never proofread.

Good overview of 10g new features but not much detail to backup examples. Book was too much like beta estudies almost word for word. Looks like he was trying to be first to market on this one. Skip it and wait for others with more detailed examples.

Perhaps I underrate this book as it might really be useful as a reference. But I am just a run-of-the-mill DBA. What I look for when a new Oracle version is out is a book that explains the new features in a readable fashion and that makes me understand anything required to pass the OCP exam (which is more than I will ever need in real life as the Oracle RDBMS is increasingly blown up with unnecessary features). This book is not a book that one would like to read cover to cover: it is very much written in the stile of the official Oracle documentation, constantly listing parameters over whole pages. This could be useful if you want to drill down into a certain feature, but in such a case you might want to turn to the online documentation anyhow. And you should have read an Oracle 10 New Features book that really made you understand the big picture beforehand.

I was on my way to write more or less a negative review of this book, however I changed my mind and now I really think that this book is a *good* reference after all. Why?
First title on Oracle 10g new features that I read was Robert Freeman's book. With modest 200+ pages it's an excellent introductory kind of text and nothing more, it's far from being considered as a reference (or complete) guide to 10g new features. On the other hand Mr. Ault, Liu and Tumma's book has from the very beginning the ambition to be a true REFERENCE, as complete as possible (they even write some short introduction about new bioinformatics features included in 10g!!). It is amazing how many information they managed to compile and present in detail, especially considering the timing - short beta cycle of 10g and obvious "gold rush" of the publisher (shame on you ;-). Sometimes their explanations are a little beat too verbose and tedious (repetitive) for my taste - sort the writing style that we're familiar in Oracle manuals.
The worst thing about this book is the lack of proper technical editing. At first, I was convinced that this book was not edited at all, or that authors reviewed each other's chapters. Then I noticed Mike's comment in which he mentioned that someone from Oracle reviewed the book. Ahh...that explains everything, they barely cope with their own official manuals and now they're helping others ;->. How bad is it? Not as bad to bash it altogether....anyway, I saved some funny comments for the end of my review, they're made by the "editor" of the book (I guess?) and were left unchanged, ended in the final print...page 445: "Not sure what you mean by example....Could you give a complete example here?" or on page 447: "Give a working example - LEVEL clause is missing and you should add parenthesis".

Not bad, not great. Mr Ault and Co. have a fair book. I feel that it might have been written in a bit of haste, and that it was written using the Beta version of 10g, as there are some things in it that did not work just quite right. Still, some good information and I'm glad I bought it. Looking forward to Freemans book as well.

I am in the 10g beta program and I was happy to see that the authors kept their focus on only the 10g features that are important.

Many other new feature book want to cover all new features even if they are not important.

Mike Ault has done an excellent job with this book and all of the 10g features are explained in the context of how they will help improve database functions.

This book is just a rehash of the manuals. Save your money.

May I ask a couple of questions to your book "new features of 10g" ?
The book says:
"In general, if the library cache ratio is over 1, you should consider adding to the shared_pool_size. Library cache misses occur during the parsing and preparation of the execution plans for SQL statements. "
Then the book gave us the statistics as follows:
Cache Misses Library Cache
Yr. Mo Dy Hr. execs While Executing Miss Ratio
---------------- ---------- --------------- ---------------
2001-12-11 10 10,338 3 .00029
2001-12-12 10 182,477 134 .00073
2001-12-14 10 190,707 202 .00106
2001-12-16 10 2,803 11 .00392
Then the book says:
"In the preceding example, you see a clear RAM shortage in the shared pool between 10:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. each day. In this case, you could dynamically reconfigure the shared pool with additional RAM memory from the db_cache_size during this period. "

So, first, the statistics didn't give us 'The library cache ratio". I only saw "the library cache miss ratio". Do
you mean that 'The library cache ratio" = "the library cache miss ratio" ?
second, "you see a clear RAM shortage", but why ? I saw library cache miss ratio only has 0.00392 (< 1).
Actually, I read only chapter one. I saw more unclear staff. So, last question, is it the whole book like this way ?

This is the best 10g New Features book out there.

I got hold of the Oracle Press New Features book as soon as it was released and was pretty disappointed as it contained very little substance.

In contrast this book contains loads of information on all the useful new features and is well worth having. I've spent plenty of time reading the Oracle manuals and it seems to me that this book condenses all the relevant information into a single volume.

This book will pay for itself, I'm glad I have it. It is excellent for getting a jump start on 10g. Cuts right to the chase. Having read some of the other reviews I think some have an axe to grind and I would not pay much attention to them.