Oracle Scripts: Powerful Tools for DBAs and Developers (Paperback)

by Brian Lomasky (Author), David Kreines (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Because most Oracle sites have similar requirements, problems, and crises, Oracle database administrators and developers find themselves constantly reinventing the wheel by writing the same kinds of scripts -- often under pressure in hit-or-miss fashion. This book provides a powerful set of tried-and-true tools for DBAs and developers. The scripts have been thoroughly tested in many different environments. You can use them right now to simplify the tasks you perform each day -- monitoring databases for reliability, protecting your database against data loss, improving performance, increasing security, and building reports that provide insight into the inner workings of Oracle databases. You can also turn to these scripts in emergencies to diagnose system problems and repair databases when the pressure is on. The accompanying CD-ROM provides a comprehensive resource for DBAs and developers. It contains complete source code for all of the scripts described in this book, as well as additional software that you will find helpful in monitoring and improving the performance of your databases.

About the Author
Brian Lomasky is a senior principal consultant with Oracle Corporation Consulting Services. He specializes in Oracle database and UNIX/OpenVMS/WinNT operating system tuning, troubleshooting, configuration, backup and recovery, and database auditing. When he isn't busy creating new scripts to solve day-to-day problems for DBAs, he has been a featured speaker at the national IOUG-A and Oracle OpenWorld conferences, as well as at local user groups.

Product Details

• Paperback: 200 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media, Inc. (May 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 156592438X
• ISBN-13: 978-1565924383
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #988,929 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Why was this book written?, July 4, 1999

By A Customer

We are used to books with example programs that contain errors. But this is Oracle Scripts, a book that is actually just a collection of scripts. Since the whole purpose of the book is to provide scripts to run, you would think the authors would have given them out to a dozen friends for testing. But nooooo....

It's not just a matter of customizing the scripts for your system. The publisher's web site has a link for "updated" scripts, where you can download 20 scripts that either have bug fixes or were accidentally omitted entirely from the book's CD-ROM.

Who is supposed to be interested in this book? Experienced DBA's will already have most of these scripts, or can find free versions from a number of sources on the web. New DBA's might like this collection if the book attempted to explain the output of the scripts, but no explanation is offered so they will be mystified.

A better book is the one from Oracle Press, Annotated SQL and PL/SQL Archives.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Be very very careful !!!, June 4, 1999

By A Customer

OK, idea of this kind of book is fine - to provide a set of usefull scripts for DBA's or anyone else who is working with Oracle databases. In reality some scripts simply don't work (e.g. the one which suppose to rename column in the table) - which is not disaster but some of them may cost you your job because you will end up with corrupted database (e.g. script for views creation) or it will simply kill some database functionality (like script for index recreation which will drop cluster indexes but will not recreate them, so you'll have to spend time figuring what went wrong). I am Oracle DBA for 8 years (also Cetrified DBA and Oracle DBA Master) and I like to use script-approach for daily work but make sure you know how to get out of trouble when dissaster strikes. And if you use this book it will !

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not on the level of other O'Reilly books, April 11, 2000

By	Ales Kavsek (Ljubljana, Slovenia) - See all my reviews

The title of this book should be "Oracle Scripts for System & DB Administrators on Unix". If you're running Oracle on anything else skip this book! You'll be better of spending time on your own searching the web or writing the scripts for yourself (and yes, reinventing the wheel...unfortunately :-( I found only a couple of useful native SQL scripts that worked fine for me (on NT and MVS), but nothing that I could not find on the web or write by myself.

I admit that it's hard to write an objective review of such book. You'll love it or you'll hate it - it all depends on which platform you run Oracle, how experienced you're in scripting, how many scripts you already have in your toolbox and how much time you're willing to spend testing the scripts from this book.

As other readers already mentioned, you should visit O'Reilly web site first and download several updated scripts before you even start testing scripts in your environment.

More universal approach to glue together SQL scripts for the purpose of this book would be with Tcl/Tk, so scripts could be run from Enterprise Manager or standalone. Just a thought..