Oracle Insights: Tales of the Oak Table
Customer Reviews: 2 Average Customer Rating:    Write a Review and tell the world about this title! People who purchase this book frequently purchase: - Cost-Based Oracle Fundamentals; Jonathan Lewis, $30.50, 39% Off!
- Oracle Wait Interface: A Practical Guide to Performance Diagnostics & Tuning; Kirtikumar Deshpande, et al, $31.50, 41% Off!
- Expert Oracle Database Architecture: 9i and 10g Programming Techniques and Solutions; Thomas Kyte, $30.50, 39% Off!
- Optimizing Oracle Performance; Cary Millsap, et al, $21.95, 37% Off!
Books on similar topics, in best-seller order:Books from the same publisher, in best-seller order:
Announcing a new book from Apress and the OakTable Network: Read unique insights
into how to develop successful Oracle applications
Twelve world-renowned industry specialists give their take on Oracle: where
it's been, where it's going, how (and how not) to use it successfully, the software
and techniques that they have introduced to help people achieve that, and some
horrific tales of what can happen when fundamental design principles are ignored,
usually in favor of "the next big thing".
A central focus of this book is how Oracle software projects can fail, and
what you can do to avoid these mistakes again. From these stories, you'll learn
the simple steps that will help you avoid real pain on your next Oracle project,
and possibly even your current one.
The collaborating authors have solved many of the worst Oracle performance
problems in the world, and they've each saved at least one doomed flagship project.
Over many years they've been sharing their unique knowledge with each other
at conferences, around the OakTable, and in coffee shops, restaurants and bars
on five continents. Now they want to share their key insights with you.
- Encapsulates the knowledge and experience of some of the foremost experts
in Oracle development
-
Covers landmark software and techniques that have changed the face of Oracle
development
-
A broad ranging, anecdotal, and humorous book that will appeal to almost all
developers, DBAs, manager, architects, who are involved with and Oracle-based
projects
Table of Contents
SECTION I -- INTRODUCTION
Chapter 1: A Brief History of Oracle -- Dave Ensor
Chapter 2: Oracle and the OakTable – Mogens Nørgaard
SECTION II – PERFORMANCE AND TESTING
Chapter 3: You Probably Don't Tune Right – Mogens Nørgaard and
Anjo Kolk
Chapter 4: Waste not, Want Not – Connor McDonald
Chapter 5: Why I Invented YAPP – Anjo Kolk
Chapter 6: Extended Trace Data – Cary Millsap
Chapter 7: Direct Memory Access – Kyle Hailey
Chapter 8: Compulsive Tuning Disorder – Gaja Vaidyanatha
Chapter 9: Testing and Risk Management – David Ruthven
SECTION III – ARCHITECTURE AND SCALABILITY
Chapter 10: Hardcore Parallel Server – James Morle
Chapter 11: The RAC Revolution – James Morle
Chapter 12: Join The BAARF Party (or not) -- Mogens Nørgaard and James
Morle
SECTION IV – DON'T TRY THIS AT HOME…
Chapter 13: Dreadful Design – Jonathon Lewis
Chapter 14: Bad CaRMa -- Tim Gorman
Chapter 15: Blackbox Mayhem -- Tom Kyte
About the Authors
Dave Ensor spent over 35 years in IT, almost all of it in a
hands-on role as a programmer, a designer, or a researcher into the performance
characteristics of specific pieces of software. He worked with Oracle databases
for 15 years in all three of these roles, also building a worldwide reputation
for his ability to present technical material with clarity and humor. He is
coauthor of the books Oracle Design and Oracle8 Design Tips, and he's an Honorary
Oracle9i Certified Master. Dave holds undergraduate degrees in both mathematics
and law.
Tim Gorman began his IT career in 1984 as a C programmer on UNIX
and VMS systems, working on medical and financial systems as an application
developer, systems programmer, and systems administrator. He joined Oracle Corporation
in 1990 as a consultant, then became an independent consultant in 1998, and
has worked for SageLogix since 2000. Gorman is the coauthor of Essential Oracle8i
Data Warehousing and Oracle8 Data Warehousing. He specializes in performance
tuning applications, databases, and systems, as well as data warehouse design
and implementation, backup and recovery, architecture and infrastructure, and
database administration. Gorman still considers himself a pretty good coder,
although the market for C programs has dried up somewhat lately.
Kyle Hailey - No biography is available for this author.
Anjo Kolk worked for over 16 years at Oracle and now runs Oraperf.com.
He is the inventor of the YAPP technique (http://www.oraperf.com/download/yapp_anjo_kolk.pdf).
Jonathan Lewis has been using Oracle for more than 17 years and
has been acting as an independent design and troubleshooting consultant for
more than 12 years. He runs JL Computer Consultancy (http://www.jlcomp.demon.co.uk)
and specializes in knowing how the database engine works. He has given a number
of presentations to the UK Oracle User Group, both at the annual conferences
and at meetings of the UNIX-related SIG. He also writes regularly for the UK
user group magazine,and occasionally for other publications such as the Oracle
magazine, Select magazine, and Don Burleson's web-based Oracle Internals. He
is a director of the UKOUG.
Connor McDonald has worked with Oracle since the early nineties,
cutting his teeth on Oracle versions 6.0.36 and 7.0.12. Over the past 11 years
Connor has worked with systems in Australia, the UK, Southeast Asia, Western
Europe, and the U.S.. He has come to realize that although the systems and methodologies
around the world are very diverse, there tends to be two common themes in the
development of systems running on Oracle -- either to steer away from the Oracle-specific
functions, or to use them in a haphazard or less then optimal fashion. It was
this observation that led to the creation of a personal hints and tips website:
(http://www.oracledba.co.uk) and to do more presenting on the Oracle speaker
circuit in an endeavor to improve the perception and usage of PL/SQL in the
industry. Like so many other development professionals, getting involved with
Oracle was a transition - from developing mainframe/Cobol systems to the "client
server revolution". As we now know, this was the "wrong" revolution
and of course the Internet is the "right" revolution. And this is
no more evident than in the use of PL/SQL, which in Connor’s opinion, has
been not so much "used" as "abused" in many of the systems
he’s been asked to assist with. Being a developer of client-based code
with tools such as Oracle Forms and server-based code has led to his passion
for PL/SQL, a passion Connor wants to share in writing this book.
Cary Millsap is the former Vice President of Oracle's System
Performance Group and the cofounder of Hotsos (http://www.hotsos.com), a company
dedicated to Oracle system performance. Hotsos provides performance-improvement
tools for Oracle environments and also delivers training in the form of clinics
and the very successful Hotsos symposiums.
James Morle - With 15 years in professional computing, James
has been personally responsible for the architecture and implementation of some
of the world's largest and most complex business systems, including a 3-node
Oracle Parallel Server configuration that services 3000 online users. . James
is a well respected member of the Oracle community, and is the author of the
critically acclaimed book, Scaling Oracle8i (0201325748, Ad-Wes). He is the
co-founder of Scale Abilities (http://www.scaleabilities.com), a specialist
consulting and training company focusing on aspects of system engineering related
to building very large and complex computer systems
Mogens Nørgaard is technical director at Miracle A/S (http:www.miracleas.dk),
a database knowledge center and consulting/training company based in Denmark,
and is the co-founder and "father figure" of the OakTable network.
He is a renowned speaker at Oracle conferences all over the world and organizes
some highly respected events through Miracle A/S, including the annual MasterClass
(2001: Cary Millsap, 2002: Jonathan Lewis, 2003: Steve Adams, 2004: Tom Kyte
and the Miracle Database Forum, which is a three-day conference for database
people. He is also the co-founder of the Danish Oracle User Group (OUGKD) and
was voted "Educator of the year" in Oracle Magazine's Editor's Choice
Awards, 2003.
David Ruthven - No biography is available for this author.
Gaja Vaidyanatha - Gaja has more than 12 years of technical expertise,
with over 11 years of industry experience working with Oracle systems. His key
areas of interests include performance architectures, scalable storage solutions,
highly available systems, and system performance management for data warehouses
and transactional systems. He holds a Masters Degree in Computer Science from
Bowling Green State University, Ohio. He has presented many papers at various
regional, national and international Oracle conferences and is co-author of
Oracle Performance 101 from Oracle Press.
Customer Reviews
Customer Reviews: 2 Average Customer Rating: Feb 5, 2005 nik
Practical and meaningful insights into oracle.
Anybody who creates and delivers software understands that the best times are when you have smart & opinionated people. When these people get the opportunity to informally sit down, discuss and knock ideas and opinions around, the outcome is usually the best for all. This book is just that. The short history on oracle versions alone will help you understand the need to keep your team current and progressing.
Jul 31, 2004 A review from UK
Not horrible - not good either
This book was shamelessly promoted on all the Oracle newsgroups as one of the finest Oracle collaborations of all time.
Some material makes sense but much of the content is rubbish, like where the authors challenge simple concepts like buffer utilisation with circular logic. The optimisation chapter is dated with Oracle 10g Automatic Session History and the OWI wait interface.
The only things that was clear after reading the book was the great self-love between the authors, most of which I've never heard of. I would recommend the Oracle Press book on wait event tuning instead.
|
