Customer Reviews

Oracle8 DBA Handbook

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

 

 

Don't waste your money! Mr. Loney has not been trained properly on the Oracle Architecture and the way Oracle works. Mr. Loney's descriptions on background processes and the way the Oracle server work do not match what Oracle publishes or teaches.

You are not required to take my word for it, read the Oracle8 Concepts Manual and the Oracle8 Administrators Guide, both published and updated by Oracle Corporation. (Available on the web at technet.oracle.com)

This is not a personal attack, I'm sure he is a nice man but his book contains many factual errors that can be verified by referencing the Oracle documentation.

I was an Oracle employee and instructor for Oracle Education and I have verified errors within the book.

This book is no longer on my recommended reading list.

This book has helped me move from a junior developer role to a dba role. I keep referring developers to specific parts like how to avoid ORA-1555 errors that I haven't seen in other places.

As a new DBA (<1yr), this book is my best reference guide. Some of the early concept parts I can do without, I prefer the concepts guide for that. The most valuable parts for me were the parts on the configuration and setup of the tablespaces, along with the backup and recovery implementation. From my read-through of the tuning material, I'm sure the tuning sections will be helpful when I get to that point. This book is not just a reference, there's a real focus on how to do things with a process-based focus.

I'd like the next edition to cover OEM instead of just focusing on the line mode commands. The line mode commands show you all of the details that OEM goes through, so that's useful, but I'd like to see the screen-based methods as well. That way the book would be even more useful for beginning DBAs.

I bought this book almost 2 years ago. In that time, I don't think I've ever referred to it. I find better, more complete, and more relevant info in the Oracle CDROM documentation, which is free.

After seeing a good review on this book, I was looking forward to getting a lot out of Kevin Loney's information. What a disappointment!

Although the technical content may be accurate (3 points), the writing style constantly led me into frustrating boredom. In my opinion, this book could benefit from including several hundred more examples to clarify its technical presenations.

In contrast, I could hardly step away from the following SQL/Oracle books: "Understanding the Oracle Server", "The Practical SQL Handbook", "The Data Warehouse Toolkit", "Oracle 7 for dummies", etc. I found these authors' writing style engaging and technically informative.

I would not recommend this book, except maybe for an extra technical reference that might someday provide some useful content.

Like his other books, this one if full of helpful hints and real-life examples of how to administrer a real Oracle DB. I like his consistent flow through the topics and the attention to detail.

A full set of Oracle documentation is over $1,400(US). This book is absolutely the best investment a professional DBA can make for their day-to-day work.

I have followed Kevin's work for quite some time now and the benefit he provides is making you understand Oracle, the various pieces and how they all fit together. His book is certainly a launching pad to becoming a great DBA.

Oracle Press is in desperate need of better technical writers. This book does have decent amount of helpful information, but it's not written or organized very well, and there are errors in the text.

Kevin Loney clearly has a following among the Oracle mavens of the world and seems to have earned that reputation through his solid command of the technical facts. I grant him that.

That having been said, I wish he was a better writer.

He has a flair for repeating statements over and over without adding much of anything. Where some writers will "encircle" a complex topic and discuss it from all angles in an attempt to describe all the complexities therein, Kevin Loney seems to merely repeat himself to hear himself talk, or to pad out the book to an even more ridiculous length.

I find almost every paragraph could have been written more clearly and vividly by simply lopping off lots of extraneous words; where was his editor, asleep at the switch???

For example, take the following paragraph from page 37, under the heading "OBJECT SECURITY":

Users who have created objects may grant privileges on those objects to other users via the grant command. They may also grant to other users the ability to make further grants on their objects. For example, you can grant a user select access to your tables with grant option, in which case that user can grant access to your tables to additional users.

Since this paragraph is in an introductory chapter, and it says over and over and over that the information there is just a cursory overview, is the third sentence (which contributes 50% to the paragraph's bulk) really necessary? In the absence of an actual syntax example, does that sentence add *any* information at all above what was given in the first two sentences? No!

I also understand from my course instructor that the statements that the DBWR handles database read operations (stated on p.29 and reinforced in figure 1-6 on that same page) is factually incorrect; it's the server "slave" processes that actually read the data files.

Summary: Solid factual information (with the one minor exception noted above) but the author's writing style is giving me major brain cramps.

This book is good. It assists you in administrating your database. The books has information that helps you better manage your database efficiently. Some parts of the books are still relevant today.