Customer Reviews

Oracle High Performance Tuning for 9i and 10g

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

For lightweight or beginning oracle dba's this book may be useful. It is way too ambitious in what it attempts to cover and is not suitable for anyone that has much of a clue already what is going on in oracle.

Particularly pathetic is the over reliance of the author in testing performance of an application he apparently patched together, running on a pentium II windows machine with 128 meg of ram. Unfortunately he bases all his testing results of this machine. A semi decent sun or hp workstation can be had for under 1000 dollars ... even a more recent intel box running linux with a reasonable amount of memory would be a much better basis.

This is an extensive, even scholarly, book by Mr. Powell. He has obviously spent a great deal of effort to explain clearly and concisely some of the most important aspects of Oracle performance tuning.

Some areas that I found especially interesting were his explanations of the various lock mechanisms in the Oracle engine. The book is also very extensively illustrated with examples of execution plans, and many SQL examples. Another area of great use is the explanation of Partitioning-an area that most of us find very confusing.

Mr Powell wisely points out the advisability of developers getting the design right in the first place-preventative medicine, as it were.

The book is also interspersed with explanations of 10g additions. For instance, he shows the improvements to the Wait Event interface starting with 10g. Toward the end of the book, Gavin illustrates how to use the interesting utility Statspack.

All in all, a very nice exposition of a very tough subject.

I have read this book and regrettably found it primitive and obscure. The author seems to have a bit of Java and development knowledge but not much of knowledge as a designer or DBA. His explanation of various items are rudimentary and shallow. When he talks about Cost based optimizer and the way it is used in Oracle, it is pretty clear to me that the author is very light in understanding the basic concepts. There are also a lot of technical errors in describing various constructs and utilities. I think this book will be useful for newcomers but hardly is a "High Performance Tuning book" as the book's title says. There are much better books around. Any of Tom Kyte's books will leave this book standing.

Before you buying it, please do take a look at the content pages. I believe every oracle dba who has over 1 year experience will be disappointed by those basic topics.
I would say, it might be a good book for trainning java developers, who have to write some embeded SQL codes.

Great examples, good explanations, worth the investment.

As an author of Oracle books myself, I am hard to please. Mr. Powell has earned my respect with this book. He uses easy to follow examples and explanations throughout. At the same time, he does not over-simplify a complex topic. His work is based on solid research and experience in the field.

I am sure this guy knows his stuff, but it sure didn't come through very clearly. I would recommend a re-write with a new editor. There didn't seem to be a smooth transistion from introduction to the deep dive. Examples are explanations of checkpoint and latches.

By the way, the Index was horrible.

Maybe it is because he came from a dev environment as opposed to systems viewpoint. Anyway, not impressed with the overall presentation, which is a shame because it looks like he has paid his dues and has something to contribute.

Database performance usually is a matter of concern to DBAs and programmers alike. This book covers nicely the issue from all points of view, and provides answers and "things to look at" which most probably will help you sorting out a performance problem.

It is well written, helpful and very easy to follow. A must.

This is an excellent book for the new someone new to performance tuning. It gives very clear and simple explanation to the approach to PT. It is a good mix of technical scripts and verbose. The author is not too chatty neither he is boring. He brings out complex ideas in a simple way without too much of mathematical jargons. Definately recommended.

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Well with all the tuning books available now... I would say this in not the top of the line performance book. Its good but if I could I would give 3.5 stars out of 5

In his book "Oracle High Performance Tuning for 9i and 10g", Mr Powell has provided a methodical framework for addressing a complex challenge by covering all three logical aspects - data model, SQL and physical - of tuning in highly readable and practical format.

The difficulty in Oracle tuning stems from the fact that the process typically involves many skill sets - from data modeling to application development to database and network administration. In between, throw in the quintessential queueing theory, hardware advances, models in concrete, domain knowledge, etc. and it can really stretch both the depth and breadth of your team's or your capabilities and interests. Mr Powell was able to address most of these issues through invaluable pointers throughout the book and kept me interested to explore the pages.

I was thus fortunate to find this book during the middle of a database migration project. Using it as a guide, I managed to put the principles (not heavy-duty theories) and working samples (yes! they worked beautifully) into action amid tight timelines. If you put in the time and effort to go through the chapters and examples, you will easily understand why I, who has for sometime stop buying IT books, consider this book as having one of the highest ROI in my library so far.

Where I find useful, but not available, are the sample databases and perhaps the inclusion of graphical query paths in the samples to illustrate the design of SQL re-write.

Overall, the book has offered a balanced, practical treatment of the subject in a concise, intelligent format. But above all and to me most important, it has been a pleasure to read. Thanks for the sharing and keep up the writing, Mr Powell!

I am so glad I bought this book. It covers all the aspect of Oracle tuning very well, like (explains Data Modelling, SQl Tuning, Instance tuning and Network tuning).
The author has done very well in explaining the concepts and working of Oracle in very good diagrams and very simple explanation.
The book also covers how to design the data when to do normalization and when not to, in a very practical manner. Which we as developer/designer may overlook at times.
The hints/tip given when to do things in OLTP and Data Warehouse world is extremely useful.
The tips on which oracle feature is either new/desupported/deprecated in future release is very helpful.
Also the examples covered during sql tuning are very good.
Overall I highly recommend this book, it is highly readable, very good explanation and hints for tuning and worth having in your library.