Customer Reviews

Oracle SQL Tuning & CBO Internals (Oracle In-Focus series)

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

 

 

First, I'm not one of the contributors to this book unlike others here who of course rated it highly, putting their interests first. Amazon, you should do a better job of checking someone's role before you let the rating get skewed by unscrupulous contributors.

Second, I did my PhD in this area and teach graduate school in database theory. So I was excited to read the description.

Unfortunately, the other reviewers are accurate: this covers multiple versions which are not interchangeable; has errors; covers nothing not available on the Oracle website; uses many different authors. I found it very misleading that the publisher let a compilation of mostly old articles pass as a new text with this title. Of course Rampant also says that books in this series are for professionals who know the concepts and it keeps its books at 200 pages or less to be concise. When I last checked the number of people who really knew optimizer internals was very small. Oh, and this declaration was on page 341. I guess Rampant needs more editing expertise.

Bottom line don't waste your money. Don't contribute to the hacks using this as marketing for their consulting efforts.

Easily the most useless Oracle book I've ever read.

I lost track of how many times it referred to the 'new features' in 8i. It even has a warning about using the CBO in release 7. Then it introduces new features in 10g. Is this a new features book or a tuning book? Does it know what it aims to be?

To add insult to injury, it provided no information that isn't easily accessable from the Oracle website or Metalink.

I should call the police because Ms. Floss and Rampart robbed me.

If this book had been sent to market as "'Intro to SQL Tuning with Reprints of Previously Published Material by Various Gurus and Breezy Transition Paragraphs by Kimberly,' editor K. Floss available in Large Print Edition Only" I wouldn't feel so ripped off. In that case, my only complaints would have to do with various inaccuracies. Basically, if you know enough about Oracle to be interested in CBO internals, you probably know everything in this silly little book.

As other reviewers have noted this book is mostly a collection of old lightweight articles by other authors (some of them not even credited).

Judging by the number of contradictions I wonder if Kim Floss herself understands the material that she re-printed.

For the real insight into CBO get Cost Based Oracle by Jonathan Lewis.

Please, don't buy it. Not only it is not well structured, but it contains not up-to-date content (some parts only apply to 8i) and a lot of miskakes as well!

This book contain obsolete information. Most of the text refers to Oracle 7 or Oracle 8 and mostly incorrect information.

Its not worth the money and time you spend reading it.

One of the reviewers of this book (Donald Burleson) is also a contributor, in fact he seems to have a track record of rave reviewing books he has co-authored or published. Treat with caution and believe what the independent contributors say!

I was happy with the price and quality of this book. The book has detailed information about the internal workings of the cost based optimizer and the scriptgs were helpful. I could recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn about Oracle SQL internals of the optimzier.

This is wasting of time and money one of the worst book about tuning i ever read. If you want get good knowledge about CBO please look on this book written by Jonathan Lewis: Cost-Based Oracle Fundamentals. The Oracle SQL Tuning & CBO Internals by Kimberly Floss is full of Oracle 10G Features with short descriptions which are worthless. And in the first section about CBO you can find few mistakes e.g. "Histograms are only effective when used on indexed columns whose data is not uniformly distributed". This book as others from rampant press have high price big letters and small value from the information point of view. I think this book should have name "Oracle 10g New and Old Features in 5 senteces each".

I found this book intresting and a useful addition to my library. The information spans multple version ( I and many I work with still support Oracle8i) which is an advantage. A hard read from front to back, buy great for looking up specific information on specific SQL tuning needs.