Customer Reviews

Oracle Performance Tuning (Nutshell Handbooks)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This text offers many, many pieces of good advice and many insights into the internals of the Oracle server. It is one of the the top two or three book s on the subject and as such, is easy to recommend. BUT, be very careful of most example scripts. Many have syntax errors (which is strange , given they are clearly 'cut and paste' from a screen dump). If you are an experienced DBA, you will spot them on reading. At worst they will be obvious when they generate an error. However for the less experienced, there could be some frustrating moments. This is very disappointing for the second edition of a book (some of the grammar leaves alot to be desired too!). Also on the downside, the book claims to include updates for Oracle 8, but this is a rather generous claim, Many examples or recommendations are redundant in an Oracle 8 environment but are not identified as such. Overall though, still a worthwhile part of any DBA's toolkit.

To say this book is only about 'Performance Tuning' would be like saying 'The Complete Works of Shakespeare' were only about Elizabethan England. As an Oracle DBA contractor, who's switched from Informix, this book was invaluable in bringing me onside with how 'Oracle' works. I have purchased a large number of Oracle texts from Amazon in the past, mostly from the Osborne and O'Reilly ranges. If for some mysterious reason, they were all to be 'borrowed' one day without trace, this would be the first one I would re-buy.

This book has a lot of Oracle tuning tips and advise about some certain plattforms and technologies. Although there's a lot of considerable information about almost anything related with Oracle tuning (including OPS), it doesn't provide with a concise method or guide.

The book is structured to help you at different stages of your Oracle implementation (design phase, production, proactive and reactive tuning, capacity planning, etc). But that good schema looks very confuse when the author starts to make suggestions or tips that aren't sorted by any kind of category (and they often takes a lot of pages)... Those comments are very good, so it needs a bit of more organization.

I recommend this book for instance and database tuning, but not for SQL tuning (the author has another excellent book on this subject). There aren't too many advices regarding the plattform (unix or nt), so, keep in mind you'll need more support.

I have been using a copy of this book for a couple of years now, and I have still kept it as my 'good tricks' bible since becoming being a certified Oracle dba. Ok, so not all the queries run first time as given, and the book is really about Oracle 7, but this is still the first reference book I turn to whenever another dba comes up with a 'I've tried everything to do this, but nothing works' type question. A very good book to read if you want to know how to make Oracle work for you.

If your measure of a truly useful technical guide is the amount of time it spends off the shelf and next to your keyboard, then this is a book you don't want to be without. It is filled with practical, real-world tips to tune your Oracle database. It covers everything from tuning your environment to tuning your queries--across all platforms! A must for developers, administrators, and users alike

The first edition, or as we affectionately called it, the "Bee" book was the bible. I recently bought the 2nd edition for old times sake. It still has a lot of good info but sorely needs to be updated. There are many Oracle8i performance features such as tempfile for temporary files that are not mentioned. Instead, I am turning to more recent text like Oracle8i & Unix Perf Tuning by Ahmed Alomari and Oracle Perf Tuning Tips by Richard Niemiec. Mark, loved your books. Can't wait for the updates.

Many of the tricks and approaches offered in here can enable you to perform some impressive rescuing of slow applications. Management tends to like this quite a bit. Having had this book from way back, there were many tips in there that were not available from the standard Oracle documentation such as making a query return unique records by using the rowid in the where clause. If you're in a database-centric development or DBA position, I wholeheartedly recommend this book.

This book has helped me quickly go from an beginning/intermediate level Oracle developer to an advanced developer. It has allowed me to quickly debug and correct real world performance problems under both Oracle 7.3 and Oracle 8.0. This was the forth Oracle performance related book I purchased and it has been ten times as helpful and insightful as the other three combined. This book is easy to understand and broken down in to very logic chapters. I can't say enough about this book. I would definitely add this to your collection!

This is a good beginner book, that covers basics of oracle performance tuning. At the same time, it does not covers statspack or AWR (only basic utlbstats/utlestat). Working with Oracle for the last 20+ years, I found Oracle statspack and AWR irreplaceable analysis tools. These tools actually enable DBAs to quantify performance impact of the bottlenecks and clearly see root causes of performance degradation. This is especially important for analysis of oracle RAC systems, as quite frequently, activity on one of the instances negatively impacts other RAC nodes or even causing instance eviction.

I have tried number of tools to analyze AWR and statspack data, including native Oracle EM (Enterprise manager). So far, I have found that Enteros' Performance Explorer-i (from [...]) provides best and state of the art performance analysis capabilities for statspack and AWR data. Usually, work of hours with AWR or statspack reports is compressed into minutes by using proprietary Enteros' spike analysis, that analyses hundreds of metrics together and provide clear picture of performance bottleneck development and correlations. Performance Explorer-i also enable me to perform automatic cross-instance analysis for RAC instances, which is extremely important for resolution of complext issues.

Also, many DBA not changing standard collection period and retention of AWR snapshots (1 hour and 7 days). I strongly recommend to change them to 15 minutes and 4 month correspondingly

This is the best overall book on Oracle Tuning but the editors were sloppy in weeding out the typos--no excuse for a second edition book. The index is one of the worst that I've ever seen in a technical book; sometimes you practically have to look at every page to find what you're looking for because of the way the book is organized.