Amazon.com: Expert Oracle Database Architecture: 9i and 10g Programming Techniques and Solutions (9781590595305): Thomas Kyte: Books

Frequently Bought Together

+

Effective Oracle by Design (Osborne ORACLE Press Series)

+

Price For All Three: $109.73

Show availability and shipping details

This item: Expert Oracle Database Architecture: 9i and 10g Programming Techniques and Solutions by Thomas Kyte
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
This item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping. Details
Effective Oracle by Design (Osborne ORACLE Press Series) by Thomas Kyte
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
This item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping. Details
Cost-Based Oracle Fundamentals (Expert's Voice in Oracle) (v. 1) by Jonathan Lewis
In Stock.
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.
This item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping. Details

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

Cost-Based Oracle Fundamentals (Expert's Voice in Oracle) (v. 1)

by Jonathan Lewis

4.6 out of 5 stars (27) $40.45

Oracle Database 10g Performance Tuning Tips & Techniques (Osborne ORACLE Press Series)

by Richard Niemiec

4.9 out of 5 stars (15) $37.79

Oracle PL/SQL Programming (Animal Guide)

by Steven Feuerstein

4.1 out of 5 stars (90) $44.09

Oracle Wait Interface: A Practical Guide to Performance Diagnostics & Tuning (Osborne ORACLE Press Series)

by Richmond Shee

5.0 out of 5 stars (35) $34.32

Oracle Essentials: Oracle Database 11g

by Rick Greenwald

4.4 out of 5 stars (11) $26.39

› Explore similar items

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Expert Oracle Database Architecture: 9i and 10g Programming Techniques and Solutions is the definitive book if you're a developer or DBA who works with Oracle-driven database applications. This fully revised edition covers both the 9i and 10g versions. It also comes with a CD containing a searchable PDF of the 8i version of the book.

One of the world's foremost Oracle experts, Thomas Kyte covers every important feature and function of the database: the importance, inner workings, proper usage, and pitfalls if handled incorrectly. This book will show you how to program correctly with the Oracle database and exploit its feature-set effectively. As a result, you will be able to build fast, effective, scalable, and secure Oracle applications.

About the Author

Thomas Kyte is the vice president of the Core Technologies Group at Oracle Corporation and has been with the company since version 7.0.9 was released in 1993. Kyte, however, has been working with Oracle since version 5.1.5c.

At Oracle, Kyte works with the Oracle database, and more specifically, he helps clients who are using the Oracle database, and works directly with them specifying and building their systems or rebuilding and tuning them. Prior to working at Oracle, Kyte was a systems integrator who built large-scale, heterogeneous databases and applications for military and government clients.

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

› Visit Amazon's Thomas Kyte Page

Inside This Book (learn more)

Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
timed events, unused blocks, free blocks, total blocks, database buffers, shared memory segments, message queues, semaphore arrays, load profile, automatic storage management, oralog oralog, index key compression, rows selected ops, single table hash cluster, tkyte tkyte, preventing other updates, using manual undo management, low distinct cardinality, data loading and unloading, emp partition, heap organized table, flashback database command, cooked file system, local prefixed index, same database block

Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Execution Plan, Rows Row Source Operation, Data Pump, Enterprise Edition Release, Production With the Partitioning, Data Mining, Oracle Support, Sun Jan, Oracle Net, Visual Basic, Predicate Information, Call Time, Type Null None, Hello World, Note There, Total Event Waits Time, Accounting Office, Sat Jul, Data Row, Oracle Forms, Body Null None, Sales Office, Finance Office, Last Used Block, Single Session

Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Surprise Me!

Tags Customers Associate with This Product

(What's this?)

Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.

oracle(9)

database(2)

oracle database internals architecture(2)

database management systems(1)

relational databases(1)

See all 12 tags...

Customer Reviews

32 Reviews

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

Average Customer Review

4.8 out of 5 stars (32 customer reviews)

Share your thoughts with other customers:

Create your own review

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

88 of 92 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Oracle Good to Great, October 26, 2005

By	Sean P. Hull "Oracle, MySQL, tuning, high ava... (New York, NY) - See all my reviews

I have a confession to make. I haven't read an Oracle book cover-to-cover in almost three years. Sure I skim through the latest titles for what I need and of course check out documentation of the latest releases. That's what good docs provide, quick reference when you need to check syntax, or details of a particular parameter, or feature, but have you ever read some documentation, sift through a paragraph, page or two, and say to yourself, that's great, but what about this situation I have right now? Unfortunately documentation doesn't always
speak to your real everyday needs. It is excellent for reference, but doesn't
have a lot of real-world test cases, and practical usage examples. That's where Tom Kyte's new book comes in, and boy is it a killer.

I've read Tom's books before, and always enjoyed them. But his new APress title really stands out as an achievement. Page after page and chapter after chapter he uses straightforward examples pasted right from the SQL*Plus prompt to illustrate, demonstrate, and illuminate concepts that he is explaining. It is this practical hands on, relentless approach that makes this book 700 pages of goodness.

Already an expert at Oracle? You'll become more of one after reading this book. With reviewers like Jonathan Lewis I expected this book to be good from the outset I have to admit. But each chapter delves into a bit more depth around subjects that are central to Oracle programming and administration.

No SCREEN SHOTS!
----------------
One of the things I loved about this book most of all is its complete lack of screenshots! But how does one illustrate a concept then, you might ask? These days with graphical interfaces becoming more and more popular even among technical folks, I run into the question of the command line over an over again. How can you be doing sophisticated database administration of the latest servers running Oracle with the command line? Or another question I often get is, can you really do everything with the command line? The answer to both is a resounding yes, in fact you can do much more with the command line. Luckily for us, Tom is of this school too, and page after page of his book are full of real examples and commands that you can try for yourself, with specific instructions on
setting up the environment, using statistics gathering packages, and so on. In an era of computing where GUIs seem to reign like magazines over the best literature of the day, it is refreshing to see some of the best and most technical minds around Oracle still advocate the best tool, command line as the interface
of choice. In fact it is the command line examples, and happily the complete lack of screenshots that indeed makes this book a jewel of a find.

Audience
-----------
As a DBA you might wonder why I'm talking so highly of a book more focused towards developers. There are a couple of reasons. First this book is about the Oracle architecture, as it pertains to developers. In order for developers to best take advantage of the enterprise investment in Oracle *** they need to thoroughly understand the architecture, how specific features operate, which features are appropriate, and how to optimize their code for best interaction with them. Of course a DBA who is trying to keep a database operating in tip top shape needs to be aware of when developers are not best using Oracle, to identify,
and bring attention to bottlenecks, and problem areas in the application. Second, it is often a DBAs job to tune an existing database, and the very largest benefits come from tuning application SQL. For instance if a developer has chosen to use a bitmap index on an INSERT/UPDATE intensive table, they're in for serious problems. Or if a developer forgot to index a foreign key column. This book directly spearheads those types of questions, and when necessary does mention a thing or two of direct importance to DBAs as well.

Highlights
-----------
Chapter 2 has an excellent example of creating an Oracle database. You simply write one line to your init.ora "db_name=sean" for example, and then from the SQL> prompt issues "startup nomount" and then "create database". Looking at the processes Oracle starts, and the files that are created can do wonders for your understanding of database, instance, and Oracle in general.
Chapter 3 covers files, files, and more files. Spfile replaces a text init.ora allowing parameters to be modified while an instance is running *AND* stored persistently. He covers redolog files, flashback logs, and change tracking file
s, as well as import/export dump files, and lastly datapump files.

Chapter 4 covers memory, and specifically some of the new auto-magic options, how they work, and what to watch out for.

Chapter 5 covers processes.

Chapter 6, 7, and 8 cover lock/latching, multiversioning, and transactions respectively. I mention them all here together because to me these chapters are the real meat of the book. And that's coming from a vegetarian! Seriously these
topics are what I consider to be the most crucial to understanding Oracle, and modern databases in general, and the least understood. They are the darkest corners, but Tom illuminates them for us. You'll learn about optimistic versus pessismistic locking, page level, row level, and block level locking in various modern databases such as SQLServer, Informix, Sybase, DB2 and Oracle. Note Oracle is by far in the lead in this department, never locking more than it needs to, which yields the best concurrency with few situations where users block each other. Readers never block, for instance, because of the way Oracle implements all of this. He mentions latch spinning, which Oracle does to avoid a context switch, that is more expensive, how to detect, and reduce this type of contention. You'll learn about dirty reads, phantom reads, and non-repeatable reads, and about Oracle's Read-committed versus Serializable modes. What's more you'll learn about the implications of these various models on your applications, and what type of assumptions you may have to unlearn if you're coming from developing on another database to Oracle. If I were to make any criticism at all, I might mention that in this area Tom becomes ever so slightly preachy about Oracle's superb implementation of minimal locking, and non-blocking reads. This is in large part due I'm sure to running into so many folks who are used to developing on databases which do indeed dumb you down *BECAUSE* of their implementation, encouraging bad habits with respect to transactions, and auto-commit for instance. One thing is for sure you will learn a heck of a lot from these three chapters, I know I did.

Chapter 9 Redo & Undo describes what each is, how to avoid checkpoint not complete and why you want to, how to *MEASURE* undo so as to reduce it, how to avoid log file waits (are you on RAID5, are your redologs on a buffered filesystem?), and what block cleanouts are.

Chapter 10 covers tables. After reading it I'd say the most important types are normal (HEAP), Index Organized, Temporary, and External Tables. Use ASSM where possible as it will save you in many ways, use DBMS_METADATA to reverse engineer objects you've created to get all the options, don't use TEMP tables to avoid inline views, or complex joins, your performance will probably suffer, and how to handle LONG/LOB data in tables.

Chapter 11 covers indexes, topics ranging from height, compression count, DESC sorted, colocated data, bitmap indexes and why you don't want them in OLTP data
bases, function based indexes and how they're most useful for user defined functions, why indexing foreign keys is important, and choosing the leading edge of an index. Plus when to rebuild or coalesce and why.

Chapter 12 covers datatypes, why never to use CHAR, using the NLS features, the CAST function, the number datatypes and precision versus performance, raw_to_hex, date arithmatic, handling LOB data and why not to use LONG, BFILEs and the new UROWID.

Chapter 13 discusses partitioning. What I like is he starts the chapter with the caveat that partitioning is not the FAST=TRUE option. That says it all. For OLTP databases you will achieve higher availability, and ease of administration of large options, as well as possibly reduced contention on larger objects,
but it is NOT LIKELY that you will receive query performance improvements because of the nature of OLTP. With a datawarehouse, you can use partition elimination on queries that do range or full table scans which can speed up queries dramatically. He discusses range, list, hash, and composite partitioning, local indexing (prefixed & non-prefixed) and global indexing. Why datawarehouses tend to use local, and OLTP databases tend to use global indexes, and even how you
can rebuild your global indexes as you're doing partition maintenance avoiding a costly rebuild of THE ENTIRE INDEX, and associated downtime. He also includes a great auditing example.

Chapter 14 covers parallel execution such as parallel dml, ddl, and so on. Here is where a book like Tom's is invaluable, as he comes straight out with his opinions on a weighty topic. He says these features are most relevant to DBAs doing one-off maintenance and data loading operations. That is because even in
datawarehouses, todays environments often have many many users. The parallel features are designed to allow single session jobs to utilize the entire system resources. He explains that Oracle's real sweet spot in this real is parallel
DDL, such as CREATE INDEX, CREATE TABLE AS SELECT, ALTER INDEX REBUILD, ALTER TABLE MOVE, and so on... Read more ›

Comment Comment (1) | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Includes the previous book on CD!, February 19, 2007

By	John (Southern California) - See all my reviews

Couldn't decide whether to get this or Tom's earlier book "Expert One-on-One Oracle." Got this and was pleased to learn that the earlier book is included as a searchable PDF on the accompanying CD! How can you beat that?

My consulting experience has been that most implementers of Oracle don't know what they're doing. Read this and you'll know what you're doing; it has quick little experiments that drive home the most important points --how to make the common cases fast-- with complete explanations. I was already Oracle certified and learned some new wrinkles. You'll know why you paid for Oracle in this day of commoditized, open-source DBMS's.

Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Oracle Architecture book, April 3, 2006

By	Ramesh - See all my reviews

I have read several Oracle 10G books before BUT Thomas Kyte's "Expert Oracle Architrecure" is an excellent resource on understanding some very basic concepts to highly technical details. For example: From chapter 2 "Architecture Overview", Tom gave a clear definition on what is a database and what is an instance. I think most of people made mistakes without knowing these details. I would strongly recommend you all to read this book. The same chapter has very technical explanation about memroy structures and networking architecture.
I recommend this book to all developers and DBAs who dealt with day to day operations maintaning the databases.

I liked the way Tom explained Files from Chapter 3. Is is good to find all configuration files and parameter files at one place and knowing them each individually.
Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 are two excellent resources to understand completely about an "ORACLE INSTANCE".

Overall I am really happy to have this book and will certainly recommend to my co-workers.

Ramesh

Comment Comment | Permalink | Was this review helpful to you? Yes No (Report this)

Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review

› See all 32 customer reviews...

Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best book of Oracle DB
Hallo,
this book is the base book for every programmer in oracle, which explains the main architecture principles of this DB system by intelligible language of Tom Kyte, the... Read more

Published 2 months ago by Mastercard

4.0 out of 5 stars recommended but flawed
I recommend this book, more so if you are new to industrial strength relational databases of today (keeping in mind this review is in June 2009) and if you are new to Oracle. Read more

Published 4 months ago by Yuri Budilov

5.0 out of 5 stars must read for Oracle user
This is THE best book for anyone who uses Oracle. I've read it several times. And I still learn from reading it. I couldn't find anything better. Read more

Published 8 months ago by SOS

5.0 out of 5 stars Must Have Book For Anyone Oracle
If you work with the Oracle database, or write software that utilizes the Oracle database, you must read this book and apply the knowledge therein to utilize the database to its... Read more

Published 9 months ago by Michael Wehrle

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant book, useful for all database developers, not just Oracle
Wow, could this be the best computer book ever written? Well, if you are using Oracle and you want to understand how Oracle works, it just might be. Read more

Published 18 months ago by Mark J. Johnson

5.0 out of 5 stars Mandatory Reading for Oracle Developers & DBA's
This is hands down the best book I've read on Oracle. It should be mandatory reading for anyone working with an Oracle database. Period. Read more

Published 19 months ago by John A. Thompson

5.0 out of 5 stars Great book
This book is accurate and undoubtfully an excellent source to learn more about the Oracle Database.
Tom is an author full of humor with a versatile approach to performance... Read more

Published on September 19, 2007 by Laurent Schneider

5.0 out of 5 stars the right approach
I actually helps you understand, rather than just throwing information at you (as many books do)

Published on July 29, 2007 by Bogdan Calmac

4.0 out of 5 stars Very Good Oracle Architecture Reference Manual
If you work with Oracle this is a manual you need on your desk. Not just for DBA's but also for developers who will derive a good insight into how they should be developing their... Read more

Published on June 11, 2007 by Peter Cunningham

5.0 out of 5 stars Oracle architecture explained simply
This is a very good book, and I will start with what it is and what it is not:

1. It is not a manual for an Oracle administrator. Read more

Published on May 10, 2007 by Dmitry Dvoinikov

› See all 32 customer reviews...

Product Information from the Amapedia Community

Beta (What's this?)

Be the first person to add an article about this item at Amapedia.com.

› See featured Amapedia.com articles

Look for Similar Items by Category

Books > Computers & Internet > Databases > Database Design
Books > Computers & Internet > Databases > Database Management Systems
Books > Computers & Internet > Databases > Oracle
Books > Computers & Internet > Programming > Software Design, Testing & Engineering > Software Development
Books > Computers & Internet > Software > Databases

	84% buy the item featured on this page: Expert Oracle Database Architecture: 9i and 10g Programming Techniques and Solutions 4.8 out of 5 stars (32) $31.49
	5% buy Oracle Database 10g Performance Tuning Tips & Techniques (Osborne ORACLE Press Series) 4.9 out of 5 stars (15) $37.79
	4% buy Effective Oracle by Design (Osborne ORACLE Press Series) 4.9 out of 5 stars (28) $37.79
	4% buy Cost-Based Oracle Fundamentals (Expert's Voice in Oracle) (v. 1) 4.6 out of 5 stars (27) $40.45

Expert Oracle Database Architecture: 9i and 10g Programming Techniques and Solutions (Paperback)

Formats

Frequently Bought Together

Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

About the Author

Product Details

More About the Author

What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?

Tags Customers Associate with This Product

Customer Reviews

Customer Discussions

Start a new discussion

Listmania!

So You'd Like to...

Product Information from the Amapedia Community

Look for Similar Items by Category

Look for Similar Items by Subject

Feedback

Your Recent History