Oracle Tuning: The Definitive Reference (Oracle in-Focus Series) at Dominant Systems Book Store

Targeted at Oracle professionals who need fast and accurate working examples of complex issues, Oracle In-focus books target specific areas of Oracle technology in a concise manner. Plenty of working code is provided without a lot of theory, allowing database managers to solve their problems quickly without reviewing data that they already know. All code scripts are available for instant download from a companion web site.

Customer Reviews & Comments
It would be easy to criticize any book on such a big topic for being incomplete. The problem here is that this book leaves out essentials that the authors have to know and just didn't bother writing down. Here's an example. "The parameter named optimizer_index_cost_adj controls the CBO's propensity to favor index scans over full table scans." Well, that's great and it's something I needed to know. So what are the values and what do they mean? You'll have to go look that up on the web. This happens over and over and suggests to me that no one bothered to read the book critically. Now I've had the book for a few days and it keeps getting worse - if I were writing my review now it would be at 3 stars and heading down toward 2. There are SO many mistakes. There are sentences with extra words in the middle - no one ever read this stuff. There are scripts that just don't work, that have SQL errors. There are pompous bits that don't say much strewn here and there. In spite of the book's apparent top-level organization, the chapters themselves are pieced together carelessly with very little development of any ideas. Bits of a given concept are referred to here and there with no attempt to tie them together. One chapter cites one value for an init parameter, another mentions a second value, but nowhere are all the values explained or compared. There's still a lot of information but some of it is hardly usable because it's incomplete, or wrong. Maybe one star.... To add insult, each script contains a warning that it can't be used for a commercial purpose without licensing it from these folks! Who on earth do they imagine is buying these books? Schoolkids? If the scripts worked this would be really sad, but as they don't it's not much of a loss. I like to think that if I get one really good idea or strategy from a book it will pay for itself, but "Oracle Tuning: The Definitive Reference" is causing me to re-think that philosophy, because it's such hard work wading through all the mess. In contrast, I'm reading Jonathan Lewis's book on the cost-based optimizer. It's lucid, coherent, well developed, and very usable. Even his old book on 8i is far more useful to me than Burleson!

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