Bookpool: Oracle 10g Grid & Real Application Clusters

Mike Ault is one of the world's most famous Oracle authors with 14 books in-print, and Madhu Tumma is a recognized Oracle10g RAC clustering consultant. Together with Ranko Mosic, they dive deep inside RAC and show you the secrets for quickly implementing and tuning Oracle RAC database systems.

Combining the expertise of two world-renowned RAC experts, Oracle Real Application Clusters is the first-of-its-kind reference for RAC and TAF technology. Covering all areas of Oracle Real Application Clusters, this book is indispensable for any Oracle DBA who is charged with configuring and implementing a RAC clusters database.

This text presents a complete guide to the installation, configuration and design of Oracle Real Application Clusters. It supplies expert internals of shared disk technology, raw devices and RAID with RAC, and exposes the internal concurrency, resource coordination and locking mechanism within RAC. The text also explains Transparent Application Failover (TAF), and monitoring & tuning Oracle10g RAC applications.

Madhu Tumma has been working as Software Developer, IT Manager, Database Administrator, and Technical Consultant for about 18 years. He has worked on a wide variety of projects and environments ranging from mainframe, client-server, eBusiness to managed services. He has provided consultancy to variety of clients on database clusters, business continuity and high availability solutions. His experience ranges across multiple relational database systems. Madhu is frequent speaker at Oracle World and IOUG where he presented many technical papers. Madhu has Master Degree in science and attended Business Management graduate program. He lives in New Jersey with his wife Hema and two children Sandi and Sudeep.

Ranko Tomislava Mosic, B. Eng., is an independent Oracle consultant with 16 years of IT experience and 12 years of Oracle related consulting. His client base includes telecommunication, manufacturing, e-business companies, government agencies and financial institutions across North America.
His responsibilities range from conceptual to physical system

design implementation and production database support.
Ranko is an Oracle 9i Certified Database Professional.

Jul 23, 2005 don@burleson.cc from Kittrell, NC
Real-world advice from the experts
Any book that attempts to address all aspects of Oracle Grid technology is going to be massive, and the authors make no apology for the complexity of Oracle Grid computing. The book Oracle 10g Grid & Real Application Clusters is the only book dedicated to Oracle10g grid computing. The text is massive at over 800 pages but the authors (who clearly have experience with grid systems) have done an excellent job in explaining Oracle Grid and how it is used with Oracle Real Application Clusters.

The first task in any such book is to explain what Oracle means by the term Grid computing, since Oracles definition is very different from the general idea of grid computing where tasks are solved in a massively-parallel fashion. Ault and Tumma begin the book with an overview of terms and concepts and they do a reasonable job in explaining how Oracles vision of grid computing fits into the generally accepted definition of Grid computing.

I especially like the unbiased nature of the book and the authors unvarnished treatment of Oracle most complex technology. With headers like Grid Is it disruptive Technology, I got the sense that these are real-world authors who have experienced Oracle grid computing firsthand and who are willing to share their experiences.

However, this is not a reference type of book where you just look-up a concept in the index. Ault and Tumma have organized the text sequentially and it is intended to be read serially, page-by-page like a college textbook.

As an experienced RAC and Grid DBA I was happy to see that the authors have recognized that the installation and configuration of Oracle Grid is a major task and nearly 500 pages are devoted to the successful set-up, install and testing of Oracle grid systems.

Because Oracle Grid computing is heavily dependent on the underlying computers and disks, the authors explain with detailed descriptions and checklists how to install and configure Oracle Grid systems on specific hardware platforms, a welcome benefit for someone who is just getting started.

It was refreshing to see that they skip the marketing hyperbola and share the benefits and shortcomings of dozens of types of hardware and disk configurations. The authors clearly have first-hand experience with these methods and their candor in describing the gotchas of grid configuration is very refreshing in this day when many Oracle books are little more than a re-hash of the Oracle documentation. The reader also gets detailed configuration tips for a hoist of third-party grid tools such as the Veritas Clustered File System, and they authors show how it compares with other solutions such as the Oracle 10g Automatic Storage Management (ASM) facility.

The second half of the book is devoted to Grid Best Practices, focusing on the Oracle grid tools, ensuring optimal grid performance and techniques for monitoring and managing a complex Oracle grid system. This is where the book gets tedious and the second half of the text is loaded-down with complicated step-by-step checklists and Oracle Grid monitoring scripts (which are available in an online code depot that comes with the book).

Its never an easy task to create a one-size-fits-all book for such a complex area of Oracle, and this is not a book to be tossed aside lightly. The sheer volume of information makes this a challenging book to digest and it was not intended for dilettantes or beginners.

However, the downside of this book is also one of its greatest benefits. It is targeted directly at experienced Oracle professionals and if you can space 15-30 hours to devote to reading it page-by-page you can get a clear understanding of how to be successful in creating and managing a grid database.

Sep 23, 2004 jacobns@martingale.com from Charlotte North Carolina
Grid in the real world
Mike Ault has done a great job with a very complex subject, making this the first and only Oracle10g Grid book on the market. The coverage is excellent, and I especially liked the section on the OEM Grid control utility. The book has complete step-by-step instructions to show Oracle 10g Grid installation and configuration so you cannot go wrong. Overall, and excellent book.