Oracle 10g Grid & Real Application Clusters: Oracle 10g Grid Computing with RAC (Oracle In-Focus series) [Hardcover]

Mike Ault (Author), Madhu Tumma (Author)

Book Description

Series: Oracle In-Focus series | Publication Date: August 1, 2004

Revealing the secrets for quickly implementing and tuning Oracle RAC database systems, this book covers all areas of Oracle Real Application Clusters including Oracle10g new features. Oracle DBAs who are charged with configuring and implementing a RAC clusters database will benefit from this complete guide to the installation as well as configuration and design of Oracle Real Application Clusters. Information is supplied on expert internals of shared disk technology, raw devices and RAID with RAC, the internal concurrency, resource coordination, and the locking mechanism within RAC. Also explained are Transparent Application Failover (TAF) and monitoring and tuning Oracle10g RAC applications.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Mike Ault is a senior technical management consultant with TUSC and holds five Oracle master certificates. He is the author of 14 Oracle-related books, including Oracle 9i RAC and Oracle DBA Exam Cram. He lives in Alpharetta, Georgia. Madhu Tumma has been a software developer, IT manager, database administrator, and technical consultant and has worked on a wide variety of projects and environments, including mainframe, client-server, eBusiness, and managed services. He has consulted a variety of clients on database clusters, business continuity, and high availability solutions. He is a frequent speaker at Oracle World and IOUG, where he has presented many technical papers and is the author of Oracle 9i RAC. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 680 pages
• Publisher: Rampant Techpress (August 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0974435546
• ISBN-13: 978-0974435541
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 7 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,311,724 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Little more than a theory book, March 20, 2005

By 

Curtis W. Diblin (Moreno Valley, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Oracle 10g Grid & Real Application Clusters: Oracle 10g Grid Computing with RAC (Oracle In-Focus series) (Hardcover)

This book is a theory book and little more than a recapitulation of the Oracle documentation and HOWTO documents provided on metalink. There are some helpful sections on RAC performance and tuning which add some value but there is simply too much filler, including the first five chapters, that contains little more than the ABCs of Oracle and fundamental OS principles.

There are a number of exciting and provocative areas for RAC research which are occurring in SUN, HP, and LINUX laboratories, focused on scalability with topspin infiniband and scaling the cluster above 4 nodes. Some of this research is coming into view with the new TCP-H numbers. Little mention of this in the text. How to scale RAC clusters by expanding the number of interconnects is not addresses or quantitized. Use of network storage and NetApps with NFS over IP or with iSCSI is not addressed. Although it is mentioned that Oracle packages its own clusterware and file sharing tools, there is no in-depth analysis of why other tools such as SunCluster, Veritas Storage Foundation suite or RehHat clustered file system might not have superior methods for data protection, performance, or usability. None of the problem areas for installation or configuration are addressed( there are many problem areas ) beyond the simple textbook installation. No mention of the new Opteron systems using Red Hat 3, 64 bit operating systems with 64 bit versions of Oracle 10g are explored. This is an important new area which SUN, HP and other vendors are providing cost/performance effective, scalable architectures when married with infiniband.

In all fairness to Mr Ault, RAC is a complex animal with adjunct 3rd party hardware and software components which are changing all the time and keeping up with the new technologies is daunting. Still, the author adds no substantial value to those who want to go beyond simple hand-waving into implementation. This is where the the text falls down.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very general coverage of material, May 30, 2006

By 

Dominic Sputo (Florida) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Oracle 10g Grid & Real Application Clusters: Oracle 10g Grid Computing with RAC (Oracle In-Focus series) (Hardcover)

You will need expert's knowledge in UNIX, Linux and Blade Servers to attempt this material. I found the book very useful for shops that have the newer Hardware technology. This book will show you how to implement the new Oracle 10g GRID technology coupled with RAC on blade servers and what is involved in the configuration process. I highly recommend only professional Database Administrators with new hardware & server(s) with more than 4gigs of memory for this book material. This is definitely not for a beginner. Please go here if you want DBA material for passing your Oracle Certification
Oracle 10g Database Administrator: Implementation and Administration
Oracle 10g Database Administrator II: Backup/Recovery and Network Administration
My favorite book in my collect besides the Bible is Oracle 9i Performance & Tuning by Course.com (over 1,000 pages and covered more information than any other Oracle book I have ever read).

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Got them all - This is the one I use., February 6, 2006

By 

Lorraine de DBA - See all my reviews

This review is from: Oracle 10g Grid & Real Application Clusters: Oracle 10g Grid Computing with RAC (Oracle In-Focus series) (Hardcover)

I have worked with RAC for 2 years and this book has addressed some of the missing pieces of the puzzle. This book is first in a new series "Oracle In Focus" and will give O'Reilly a run for their money.

I really like this book and although I did have some critiques I felt that I could not resist. However, RAC is a very sophisticated Product and the authors have done a splendid job in bringing all of the material under one cover.

This book does a great job laying out the differences between RAC and OPS. It also covers the architecture and implementation of RAC for all major platforms including Veritas DBE/AC. The architecture discussion covers areas such as I/O Fencing, SCSI3 Persistent Reservations, and Quorum Disks in Chapter 3. This is important information which sets a basis for the next chapter. In Chapter 4 RAC technical Architecture is thoroughly reviewed after a brief overview of the OPS evolution.

Chapter 5 is a brief chapter that covers Hardware and RAC and explains the Implementation of RAC from a hardware perspective. I liked the approach taken by the authors because they do a good job tying in CFS or RAW with the disk subsystem.

Chapter 6 is a 100 page chapter that covers RAC Install and configuration for almost every platform. It is high level but covers the subject matter well. It is very current in relation to where Oracle is with Patch sets and such. I had only wished they covered the Linux install better and covered the watchdog/hang check timer kernel transition.

Chapter 7 is dedicated to the RAC internals and is good at condensing the internals that is covered in the Oracle RAC concepts guide. It is in Chapter 8 that the authors cover Threads but they stop short of explaining of how threads are used to generate SCN's and the role they play in recovery and Data Guard gap resolution.

Chapter 10 covers TAF (Transparent Application Failover) connectivity to RAC. Although this chapter covers the subject matter okay it is weak in when they cover load balancing on the nodes.

The remaining chapters are pretty good after skimming over them. I will update my review after finishing the book. Don't get me wrong by my critiques. I like this book very much. This book is a must for anyone who is interested in RAC.