|
10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
3rd edition of a great book (smaller yet bigger), February 17, 2004
Audience - Technical staff such as Basis and Database administrators, system administrators, developers and their managers, though primarily for experts in those areas - not for lightweights!This book is extremely useful, being chock full of words of wisdom, with both a cookbook and flow chart approach for diagnosing performance issues in a staggering number of areas with the SAP enterprise application, given that it contains less than 500 pages. I have the 1st edition, which now seems to be going for a premium on Amazon. There is new material in this edition, but not really enough new material on some of the older topics. There is some mention of transactions available now that were not in SAP "way back then." The English is extremely clear, concise and descriptive throughout the book -- kudos to the author and the translators. Those who have read SAP notes will know exactly what I mean. The chapters are logically divided into focus areas, and within chapters, further divided into narrower focus areas, so that, for example, table buffer tuning is confined to pages 301 - 330 of Chapter 9. Other cross-references to that topic exist in other areas of the text to direct you (usually) to the right section for the problem at hand. Some subjects are scattered in several places (by necessity), being introduced early and dealt with in detail later. One example is memory management, which is introduced in Chapter 2 via SAP transaction ST02, then the book turns to work process analysis. Chapter 8 deals more fully with memory management. If you look up memory management in the index, however, only 4 pages are referenced (267, 277, 450 and 483), skipping the crucial introductory material from pages 98-106, and the majority of the chapter devoted to the topic. Some of the later index references for memory management are marginally interesting, such as which parameters need to be set and which Online Service System (OSS) notes are relevant to the topic. The 3rd edition is physically smaller than the 1st edition than I have, having 494 numbered pages now, compared to the original 545, and a different form factor of 165 x 240 mm, vs. 185 x 225 mm in the 1st edition. Some redundant content seems to have been edited out, the typeface is smaller, the pages are denser (less whitespace) and it fits better in my backpack. One gripe I have with the refactoring is the omission of chapter numbers on the page borders, so that skipping to a specific chapter often involves a detour to the table of contents. Some Errata and Ambiguities Page 100; Program Buffer; the statement "approximately 10,000 swaps per day represents an acceptable number of buffer displacements" is presented without a meaningful context such as whether this is dependent on system up time, number of users, number of new vs. changed programs, and whether this is acceptable because it is unnoticeable to users or what. Page 163; The caption to table 4.5 should read "Enqueue trace" rather than "SQL trace". Page 319; Monitoring Table Buffers, mentions an "invalidation rate" without defining it. In the 1st edition, this was defined on page 278 as "the ratio of invalidations to total requests." While this may be obvious to the authors, beginners need this formula to continue. What I'd like to see in the next edition: Some improved graphics! Figure 9.2 has shrunk to near uselessness; the original figure (7.2) occupied more than half of the larger page, while this one is less than one-fourth of the now-smaller page. Figure 11.2 has also shrunk, plus it still relies on several shades of grey to make a point about relative percentage that could be reinforced with some simple numbers ("the pale rectangles, some of which contain the data bars"). Page 400 talks about index fragmentation and suggests delete and recreate, while Oracle (and presumably other DBMSes) can use online index rebuild to avoid the delete step. This could be useful to some readers.
|
