Customer Reviews

Oracle Scripts: Powerful Tools for DBAs and Developers

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

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.

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 !

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..

If you have some time on your hands and want to line-by-line debug/modify/enhance a set of scripts that were originally written for Oracle 7, then buy this book. Otherwise, take a pass.

Three years after it was published, there still is a need for Oracle Scripts: not because of any inherent excellence, but because the tools Oracle itself provides are somewhat obtuse. Be aware that the scripts reside only on the accompanying CD and are buggy. Get updates from the O'Reilly website.

As some other reviewers have noted, the scripts are targeted for UNIX DBAs. Conversion to NT platform is not difficult, but you're buying the book to avoid unnecessary coding, aren't you? Lastly, and most annoyingly, there is very little supporting documentation in the text.

There are a few useful scripts but I have to work more than I should to make them all work in an NT environemnt. The best two scripts 'alertlog' and 'every5' were written for Unix and I cannot use them as is w/o MUCH conversion. Also the book is VERY light on explaining the scripts (no source in book - impossible to review - scripts are only on CD). The best book on scripts so far is the Oracle Press 'PL/SQL Annotated Archives' by Loney. Now THAT book was worth ten times what I paid for it. It had many useful scripts ready for cut and paste.

As an Oracle Certified Professional DBA, I found this book to be worth every cent. The scripts are comprehensive, covering almost every area that could possibly need attention. Although the O/S specific scripts will need some modifications to run on O/S's other than Unix, the SQL portions are exactly the same across any imaginable platform. You could find some of the same functionality in many of the enterprise management tools, but these enterprise management tools cost orders of magnitude more than this book AND you have to be a rocket-scientist to configure and use them. Brian and David, please keep up the good work!

About three years ago I was an Informix contractor, but Oracle8's arrival killed off the market. The dribble of contracts left were of the "Informix Project Converting to Oracle" variety. Extracting my head from the sand, I leapt across into Fortress Oracle before the drawbridge lifted. As a born-again Oracle DBA, I then encountered SQL*Plus; which was not spirtitually uplifting. The best thing in Informix for me had been the 'isql' tool. While Uncle Larry had poured his energy into sales development, Informix had created lots of lovely tools. Without the crutch of 'isql', all sorts of awkward people now asked me devilish questions, such as "Why am I paying you, when you know nothing?". But after scouring bookshelves for help, "Oracle Scripts" fell into my grasping hands. Like Indiana Jones on the bridge in 'The Last Crusade', its broad scattering of SQL made the way clear. Hundreds of well-written front-end scripts, covering every area of Oracle an old Informix hacker could wish for, easily manipulated into your own favourite toolset. As for back-end background coverage, the book's "every5" script series cuts out blood-pressured calls from suits, giving you advance bad news via email. When the calls come now, I've already sorted the problem (touch wood). Which is a big improvement from living in Panic-Reaction city, Arizona.

Andy Duncan, Oracle Certified Professional DBA

Many of the scripts in this book DO NOT work. While there are several time-bombs in these scripts, the most distressing was using the script to punch views from Oracle. The script is WRONG, and does not include column aliases from DBA_TAB_COLS. I corrupted my database with this mess, and I would not recommend this book to anybody unless they have a death wish.

I just bought this book and installed the scripts, and the "every5" script has already warned me of an impending disaster and as a result literally saved my job! I can't believe such a wide array of useful scripts is available for such a reasonab le price! O'Reilly is to be commended again!

When I bought this book through the Amazon online, I did not have the opportunity to review the book otherwise I would not have bought the book!.

This does not mean that the book is not good, what this means, is that most of the scripts needs to be modified to run on any other platforms other than Unix. The Authors, should have named the book "Unix Oracle Scripts".

The scripts that are native sql, works fine but you have to rewrite the rest of the scripts to run for example in Windows NT oracle 7.4.

Next time I buy the book from the Amazon.com, I will need to exactly know what platform the scripts are supposed to support.

One of the reason for buying this book, was to cut the development time. It turns out , that I have to rewrite these scripts to run on NT. I would have done better writting them myself.

I give the book a one star.