Customer Reviews

Oracle8 & Unix Performance Tuning with CDROM

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

 

 

I bought this on the recommendation of two people with much more tuning experience than I have. They both said that it gave the most complete set of tuning advice and I defer to their judgement on that. The editing, however, is terrible.

Some sections only cover to Solaris 2.4, while others are updated to cover 2.6. The information in the section "Stripping on Sun" is five years old, with the author/editor covering the next generation of product in a new section. It looks like a slipshod update of the original book.

Mr. Alomari managed to accomplish an extraordinary feat: presenting Oracle tuning in a concise, yet not superficial way. There are many originally undocumented (or poorly documented) features which are invaluable. A few topics, however, miss some explanation. But, all things considered, it is an excellent book. He addresses many issues that are really hard to find, especially on the interaction between UNIX and Oracle. When he says you cannot fix half of you car's engine, he is not exaggerating. In my consulting practice, I tend to see both many Oracle and many UNIX experts, but much work is poorly done because of this fragile knowledge by the two parties. This book may be an efficient tool for breaking that wall, and, believe me, it makes the difference. I only wonder why he did not cover other UNIXes like AIX and DIGITAL, which have a big market share...

Chapter 1-2 provides lengthy explanation about Unix performance tuning. From DBA's standpoint, I would suggest readers to work closely with SA instead of trying to play SA's role. Read them but do not apply your knowledge without SA by your side!

Chapter 3 is a good one.

The rest of the books can be skipped if you have read OCP's training material or Oracle8 Backup & Recovery and Performance Tuning.

Regarding SQL tuning, I would highly recommend Oracle SQL High-Performance Tuning.

For me is just the best Oracle Book that I saw ever (and I saw many in 10 years working exclusively with Oracle databases).

The only book that teaches well the diference between the two Oracle 8 parameters "db_writer_processes" and "dbwr_io_slaves".

All the other books that I saw, say that "db_writers" in 7 is now called "dbwr_io_slaves" in 8, and they don't even mention the "db_writer_processes" parameter, and that's wrong.

If your O.S. takes good advantage of async.io use "db_writer_processes" (multiple DBWR processes), if not, use "dbwr_io_slaves" (uses only one DBWR process no matter what you put on "db_writer_processes", the "dbrw_io_slaves" are slaves of that process, in this way oracle simulates async.io, but if your O.S. takes advantage of async.io and you use "dbwr_io_slaves", the performance can be a disaster).

Waiting for another great book from you and thank you very mutch.

The second edition is 10 times better than the first edition (which I also rate highly). The second edition covers the latest releases of Oracle8 and provides an enormous amount of real-life examples that I used to increase our system's performance. This book is a wealth of information for system and database administrators as well as application developers.