A Look At The Latest Oracle Books

November 28th, 2004 by Mark Rittman

A selection of books that I’ve been looking at recently.


 I
mentioned the other week
that I had recently ordered Richmond Shree’s and Kirtikumar Deshpande’s

"Oracle Wait Interface : A Practical Guide To Performance Diagnosis & Tuning"
to get more of a detailed understanding of the Oracle Wait Interface following a
tuning exercise. This book really needs to be read in conjunction with

"Optimising Oracle Performance" (and even with

"Effective Oracle By Design") to really understand the context of Oracle
tuning, and it complements these two books by providing a detailed reference on
the wait interface, an overview of the different wait events, detailed notes on
how to deal with common I/O, locks and latency wait events, and an introduction
to the wait interface-based performance tuning features in Oracle 10g. It’s
something you’d dip into as a reference rather than read cover to cover,
although the first few chapter should be read in sequence to learn the
background to the wait interface and why it’s use has supplanted traditional
ratio-based tuning; other than that it’s an excellent reference to the OWI and
one worth getting hold of if you’re looking at this technique. On the same
theme, Stephen Andert has recently written another
wait interface book titled

"Oracle Wait Event Tuning" that also comes with an online code repository
with scripts for you to download.
Rampant
Techpress were kind enough to send me review copies of a number of their
books, and one that I was particularly interested in taking a look at was Mike
Ault’s

"Oracle 10g Grid & Real Application Clusters". From a data warehousing point
of view, one of the proposed uses of grid technology was to have a grid of
servers, running a single Oracle instance but with one server dedicated to ETL,
two to OLAP, a couple more to large data warehouse queries and so on and this
book certainly is a pretty comprehensive look into RAC and grid technology. The
book covers a lot about the storage technologies underlying grid (ASM, HARD,
CRS) and is built (presumably) on the core of Mike’s previous Oracle 9i RAC
book. It’s a hardback and a bit pricier than the usual Rampant books but looks
pretty much like the definitive RAC and grid book. As well as the 10g RAC and
Grid book, I also found Dave Moore’s

"Oracle Utilities", a look at the lesser-known and hidden Oracle utilities
such as oradebug, dbverify, tkprof and Trace Analyzer an interesting read, and
Dave maintains a website at
http://www.oracleutilties.com that features a weekly Oracle Utility
Spotlight.

The last book in this round up is one that I’ve
personally been involved in and is due to be published around the 14th December
this year.

"Oracle Database 10g Data Warehousing", the follow on to

"Oracle 9iR2 Data Warehousing", was co-authored by Lillian Hobbs,  a
regular UKOUG speaker and Pete Smith, who I recently worked with on a project
for a company in the UK. Pete asked me to do a bit of last-minute technical
reviewing on the book and certainly from the chapters I saw - backup and
recovery, summary management and Enterprise Manager - it’s a pretty
comprehensive introduction to all of the key 10g DW features. Like it’s
predecessor, it’s an introduction to each of the 10g DW server-side and tools
components and as such a companion to the online docs, so if you’re looking for
a "why" book rather than a "how" one I’d
still recommend Bert
Scalzo’s

"DBA Guide To Data Warehousing And Star Schemas" which explains why you’d
want to use pipelined table functions, star transformations and so on rather
than just doing things the way you’d do with an OLTP application. Still, it’s
about the best 10g Data Warehousing book you can get, Lillian works on the
Oracle product team whilst Pete used to work for Oracle Consulting, and if it’s
anything like the 9iR2 book it’s a great introduction to all the 10g DW tools.
One point to bear in mind though is that it’s based on 10.1.0.2 and AS10g
(9.0.4), so it doesn’t cover AWM10g or Discoverer "Drake" as far as I know.

 

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