oracle

This book is a great starting point for beginners (like myself) or a good reference for even experienced Oracle DBAs. It is just what you would expect from an O'Reilly book, it is very readable and presents information in a logical manner. It is refreshing to finally find a book about Oracle performance that does more than provide a collection of "tips" that you can try and then cross your fingers hoping it will improve things. I enjoyed this book thoroughly and it will definitely stay in my library.

I give it only 4 stars instead of 5 because of a couple reasons.
1. The author really pushes his hotsos profiler, which I don't mind too much. What did bother me a little bit is that in his case studies and any time showed "Method R" in action, he used the output of the profiler as a starting point. It would have been nice to assume the reader is not going to purchase the profiler and proceed from that point instead of always starting at the resource profile which the profiler outputs. This is a little nitpicky I admit.

2. I would have liked to see an expanded section on seeing Method R in action, or even downloadable sql scripts that you could run on a database and then find the bottleneck in its execution.

Overall, I definitely would recommend this book. It is well worth the money and time.

If you want a quick checklist of whats wrong with your Oracle systems - do not buy this book.

If you want validation of your existing tuning techniques - so not buy this book.

If you want to be told what to do without thinking - do not buy this book.

If on the other hand you are fed up with received wisdom that does not work, you recognize that performance tuning is a valuable skill for your business and you wish to learn an effective scientific and repeatable approach to improving the performance of your business systems, don't just buy this book but live it. Cary and Jeff take a rigorous, scientific approach to performance tuning that is especially suited to Oracle systems and by both formal proof and real world example show that the mystery of Oracle performance is controllable by you.

The only downside comes from explaining to your boss that the thousands you spent on automated performance tools were wasted.

A word about the Math. 2/3 of the book has no math at all in it. The remainder of the book was perfectly understandable to this reader, whose academic background is Economics and Philosophy not maths or computer science. Don't be put off by the idea that the book has equations, a competent High School student can follow the relevant mathematical arguments.

I've been working with Oracle software for the last 6 years, and read all books by leading experts such as Tom Kyte, Steve Adams, Donald Burleson, Mike Ault, Jonathan Lewis, Christopher Lawson, and I cal tell you that Cary's work is a "top shelf", probably ranks right next to the famous Steve's 120-page masterpiece. It is NOT a casual reading, and you probably will have to re-read some sections to fully understand what Cary is trying to explain. His walkthrough the extended SQL trace file is just unmatchable. You can write your own SQL trace file parser right off that book. If you are a DBA working on complex performance problems, you will not solve them without this book. Every corporation should purchase a copy and give it to every DBA in the company! And make sure they read it cover to cover.