Customer Reviews

Oracle High-Performance Tuning with STATSPACK

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This book is a generalized look at tuning performance problems with Oracle's Statspack product. The majority of the examples and scripts are based on the Unix OS. If you are looking for a book on tuning Oracle on Unix, this is not it....

Beginning DBA's will get a fair amount out of this book. While I disagree with the author's methodology to solving performance problems, it would be a roundabout method for Novice DBA's to tune their systems. Experienced DBA's will find little new information in this book.

While Don does touch on that statspack package, most of the information comes from his custom scripts. He references the default statspack report very few times and never goes through a comprehensive step-by-step explanation of what everything means....

I was expecting this book to describe and help me decipher the statspack information to help me tune the database. Author focuses more on customizing statspack and running scripts against the statspack tables. Anyways, not what I needed. I'd like to know how to decipher Oracle's cryptic information.

"High-Performance Tuning with Statspack" establishes a baseline understanding of tuning and addresses each topic in an easy to understand manor, with illustrated examples of how to implement the concept. There are commands and tools to identify network and system performance slow downs, like top, iostats and vmstat. Each is documented how to use and what the output really means. Examples throughout the book include the commands for different hardware, like Solaris, HP and AIX. The one thing I found most useful was the methodical way to identify a performance issue as a network, system, rdbms or sql code issue. This book is filled with tips and tricks, sql code, and other useful commands that help you get to the heart of the your tuning issues.

Doesn't have details on interpreting STATSPACK reports. The other inforamtion in the book can be gleaned from various websites. Thoroughly disappointed. Waste of Money

The title belies the scope of this terrific book which is really a comprehensive approach to Oracle tuning. It's not just a "How-To-Do-Statspack" book but it covers Oracle tuning from top to bottom including: tuning the environment (server, disk, network), tuning the Oracle instance (SGA), tuning Oracle objects (tables, indexes, segments), and finding and tuning problem SQL statements. From an "everything-that-touches-Oracle" perspective the author ties it all together with metrics from statspack. Most authors barely make mention of tuning Oracle for the network but I found some great Net8 tuning advice right away. It also comes with tuning tips for PQO and OPS. Some may think the top down approach de-emphasizes SQL tuning but not so. The author even tells how to tune 3rd party applications where you can't touch the underlying SQL code. The book comes with lots of scripts and the author shows how you can do trend analysis with Excel. You can even graph your own performance metrics with free packages like "RRDtool" and other free web-based graphing tools. You can spend $1000's on a 3rd party monitoring package and still not understand tuning or you can buy this book, use the scripts and statspack utility that comes with Oracle, tune the database with understanding, then observe and document the improvements you made with captured statistics. This is a roll up your sleaves kind of book.

It's quite difficult to write a book about statistical analysis, UNIX server tuning and Oracle tuning. What's very difficult is to have a general method for several UNIX flavours (and NT, of course) and Oracle versions. Generally speaking, this book exposes basic and advanced techniques for server and Oracle tuning.

What is very interesting, is the trend-analysis approach the author uses to show statistical performance information. Using this approach, you can make a better capacity planning for your database. With this book, I realized there was no reason for still wasting my time analyzing UTLBSTAT/UTLESTAT reports, wich cann't provide me with any time-based information and a limited scope of statistical information.

Another good point, this book helps you to make extensions for the STATSPACK code. For example, it includes several scripts about how to collect and analyze server performance statistical information (like VMSTAT, SAR, etc). Regarding this point, it's advisable you check too the server provider tuning manuals (like Compaq, Sun, HP, IBM, etc) to confirm any performance recomendation.

For Unix servers and complex tuning, take a look for Ahmed Alomari-Oracle8 and Unix tuning, wich is very much deep and precise.

Statspack is one of the best Oracle provided tuning utilities to be released. However, Statspack is a complex program to install, run and most importantly, understand the output from. In this book Don leads the reader through the installation, setup and use of the Statspack packages. In addition Don shares numerous scripts and techniques for expanding Statspack to allow the user to monitor system and disk related statsitics as well as database internal statistics.

Over all an excellent book for both the beginner and advanced DBA who wants to get up to speed on the Oracle Statspack package in the shortest possible time.

Great book, very helpful. It does a wonderful job of explaining how to tune Oracle. Author provides many tips and tricks to improve performance. It contains easy to follow, step-by-step installation instructions and comes with many useable and helpful scripts. I give it an A+!

This was a pretty basic book, with no real insights into how to performance tune databases. The techniques provided may work, but not in the majority of cases.

I found this to be an easy step-by-step guide to the install and use of STATSPACK. The pre-tested scripts are great, and I was able to get STATSPACK running on my database in just a few hours. The STATSPACK extentions for table and index data are also very useful. The text is well-written and easy to understand.