Customer Reviews

Oracle Insights: Tales of the Oak Table

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is intended for Oracle internals experts who want a deep, deep drill down into the guts of Oracle to look for optimizations. It's well written and very in-depth, but you should have a look at the table of contents to make sure that you can get anything out of this book before you buy it. If you aren't the target audience then you are likely to get little or nothing out of it.

I really don't know where I should begin writing this review to give the book a proper credit that it deserves. Hmm...FUN - I think that this word best describes this collection of essays (eleven prominent authors instead of more usual one or two, certainly helped a lot).
Can't remember when was the last time that I read technical book that kept me reading and reading, and reading - simply because all essays were *fun* to read. To be clear, yes I'm an Oracle geek, but I don't think you have to be an expert to understand 'the point' in the majority of the book, on contrary, if you're by any chance an Oracle newbie you have an opportunity to learn from the true experts (from their work done on the "projects from hell") and pick up some good habits and techniques to start your Oracle career (this book is not really about internals as much as it's about proper design and importance of understanding technology before using it - and using it to the full extent - you'll probably never again write DB agnostic applications, if this was your sin in the past :-).
So, being an expert or not, I'm sure you'll get the true 'message' from this book that will stick with you for the rest of your life (of course experts will enjoy reading it slightly more, they'll finally learn, what AFIEDT.BUF is really all about ;-).
Finally, thank you guys for writing this book, and Mr. Mogens Noorgard (you lucky *****), thank you for "networking" Oak Table members together.
Thank you for reading this review.

I have 14 years of Oracle Experience with some of the busiest and largest transaction systems in the world. This book really hit home for me and brought back a lot of memories of painful times as well as gave me new insights. I have re-read this book twice since getting it amonth ago. It is that good.

The Tales of the Oaktable is a skeptic's work of technological history that is funny and hard to put down, but which also provides experienced database professionals roadmaps to solve their pressing problems ( or even see that they have a problem.)

The authors take an empirical, rational approach to diagnosing and discovering the most serious problems while providing amusing revelations about the people and organizations they have worked with. Along the way they lift Oracle's skirts and take us out back to show us the dirty laundry and other junk in Oracle's back yard. They provide methods to diagnose and reapir problems in oracle performance as well as enumerate the known pitfalls in project management and database design. Seasoned IT types will groan and laugh during these chapters.

They also look at larger architectural, economic, psychological, and philosophical issues which have a direct impact on databases and large information systems. Norgaard's history of computing is quite depressing. And I agree that many of the "new" blood wants to focus on .NET and J2EE - when the real heart and soul is still the data.

Oracle Insights DOES require both deep thought and deep, hard-won knowledge of Oracle in order to fully enjoy it. So, if at first you don't like it, then you don't know what you don't know.

As an Oracle and SQL Server DBA for the last seven years I found this book an excellent and very refreshing change from technical manuals and books on Oracle database design and administration. The first few chapters are priceless from Oracle history to the useful read on Oracle tuning using Wait events. I really enjoyed learning how the product evolved from inception to the new version of 10g. All in all money well spent and nice to know that even such gurus as the Oak Table guys are human and have shared tough DBA experiences. Someday I want to meet and work with these guys!

This book is not designed to teach you anything about programming, database administration, or architecture. It is an excellent series of essays about real life professional experiences. Two essays stand out above all the others. The first essay in the book about the evolution of the Oracle database provides excellent insites into how the database has changed over time.
The other article that stands out is the last one by Tim Gorman about the worst project he has ever been on. The project was run so badly it put a young company out of business.

One of the few books on the topic of Oracle and performance that can actually be read cover to cover, the authors themselves are brilliant indiviuals and each contribute their own perspective and styles on various areas that are both insightful and useful and quite frankly easily palatable....and often rather humorous !

Thoroughly enjoyed reading this and highly recommend it !

This book delivers the fun "back stories" on both Oracle databases in particular, and database-oriented application development in general. For example: why did Oracle personnel -- in sheer desperation -- start instrumenting the DBMS? Because they couldn't figure out what their highly-complex software was doing either! Now it's public knowledge how to track every step of Oracle execution.

Why do projects fail despite Oracle being highly-scalable? Because people *assume* they know what the Oracle DBMS will do, so they never test for scalability before throwing the project into production! Tale after tale prove you can't optimize what you never tested: only ignorance and hubris are infinitely scalable!

If you wanna do Oracle DBA/architecture professionally, you'll end up reading this one. Sooner is better than later. Similar in world view to the AskTom site and oracle-l. Database work from the inside....

Declaration of Interest: I was lucky to have worked alongside one of the authors. So that's why I bought it.

Glad I did. Read it on the beach over Easter weekend. Dipped in and out. Learned and laughed. Certain to re-read some chapters, and to refer back to it. The very different styles of the contributors make it all the more readable - you just don't know whats coming next.

Its worth the price for pretty much any 3 of the 11 chapters, even if you chose them at random. And you can hit your SAN manager over the head with it, he probably won't feel a thing anyway.

Thank you OakTable.

But its not in your shopping cart yet is it, because I've marked it down a star. Look, there are some minor bugbears. Don't be put off, just setting expectations:

1) There's some heavy name-dropping, perhaps in keeping with the project. Perhaps I'm jealous my brain isn't the size of a planet; these chaps' are.

2) You can see from (1)that HHTTG was funny once, about 20 years ago. My dad has been citing it as the answer to everything ever since; its worn a bit thin. I'm sure he would love this book for exactly that reason.

3) I'm the sure the sequel will be even better.

You can put me down for 2 copies of "Seeing Double: Tales from Under the Oak Table" while I'm here.

The book is aimed squarely at an existing Oracle user. It offers idiosyncratic viewpoints devoted to filling in gaps in the official Oracle documentation. The authors are longtime Oracle experts who offer advice on how to optimally use various Oracle versions, and how to avoid potential pitfalls in usage. Being a mostly MySql user myself, there was little here germane to my database operations.

But the first chapter stands well apart from the rest of the book. A behind the scenes history. Presumably unfettered by Oracle's corporate lawyers. A fascinating warts and all technical commentary on the development of the Oracle database. [And there are plenty of warts.] It can and probably should be read by anyone in the database field. Enough technical details are given to illustrate the best and worst features of each major Oracle release. Yet during all this 25 years, Oracle rose from nothing to being the world's largest database company. They must have been getting crucial capabilities implemented correctly. The first chapter is a good complement to other books on Oracle that are written for a general audience. Those books describe more of the business/corporate side of Oracle. Of necessity, they had to go easy on the technical details. This chapter helps fill in those gaps. Also makes one wonder what a similar description of IBM's dB2 history would say.