Rating: 
Summary: Tuning Essentials
Review: The authors have successfully detailed the essence of Oracle database tuning, while avoiding the often confusing tangents that other tuning books include. One need look no further than this text to be able to tune Oracle using the "wait" interface, and drill down to discover the performance bottlenecks and problems that often plague Oracle-based systems. Highly recommended even for experienced Oracle DBA's...
Rating:
Summary: Best book I read on Oracle Performance Tuning
Review: The best book I read on Oracle tuning. Not only it cuts through the DBA myths and folklore, but lays the foundation on the new concept, Wait Events. It is a relatively new concept, and is miles ahead of old style tuning techniques. I used these concepts and they work like a charm. I love this book and would highly recommend to anyone who want to dig into Oracle performance tuning.
Rating:
Summary: Highly Recommended Book to read
Review: The book makes little assumptions about the readers skill level thus covering many otherwise ignored aspects of tuning.
It is interpersed by many highlights and references from outside the realm of databases to buttress some points.
Covers performance tuning and especially the important views v$system_event,v$session_event,and v$session_wait views properly
Great book to read
Rating:
Summary: Highly Recommended Book to read
Review: The book makes little assumptions about the readers skill level thus covering many otherwise ignored aspects of tuning.
It is interpersed by many highlights and references from outside the realm of databases to buttress some points.
Covers performance tuning and especially the important views v$system_event,v$session_event,and v$session_wait views properly
Great book to read
Rating:
Summary: First book to profess a Tuning Methodology
Review: This book is one of the best, one could come across on the subject of Oracle Performance tuning. Gaja and team had done a marvellous job of disarming the complexity of the subject. How was it different from other books i read on this subject? This book gave a methodology, a process, an approach to address the task of VLDB tuning. They have succeeded in their effort to make tuning a science instead of making it look like an art. They have written a highly technical book without once referring to any of X$,$,# tables. Their suggestions and examples are all practical. A must have. If I were to pack one book on a tuning assignment, this would be the one.
Rating:
Summary: This is a MUST BUY
Review: This book is the real deal. The authors dig down into the heart of the database and the operating system to provide some of the most in-depth, detailed information you will find. But that is not all! They provide a strong tuning methodology backed by solid real-life examples. Do you want to know the ins and outs of tuning your system for a particular OS? Can you tell if your system is using memory efficiently? What changes should you look at in version 7.3.4, 8.05, or even 8i? How do you avoid rollback contention? Those questions and many more are addressed in this excellent book. I give this book my strongest endorsement.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent book
Review: This guy has a clue. "Good" ratios don't mean anything if the users are complaining. EXAMINE THE WAIT STATS. Anyway, this fellow is an Oracle genius and actually has a sense of humor. Loved his explanation of pctfree/pctused. Even a child could understand it! My big complaint though (and the reason this did not get 5 stars) is that the #&)@! book falls apart. The binding is cheap or something. I have other books in this series and they have all fallen apart too. I guess Elmers Glue doesn't work on 400 page books. Other than that, awesome book.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book
Review: This guy has a clue. "Good" ratios don't mean anything if the users are complaining. EXAMINE THE WAIT STATS. Anyway, this fellow is an Oracle genius and actually has a sense of humor. Loved his explanation of pctfree/pctused. Even a child could understand it! My big complaint though (and the reason this did not get 5 stars) is that the #&)@! book falls apart. The binding is cheap or something. I have other books in this series and they have all fallen apart too. I guess Elmers Glue doesn't work on 400 page books. Other than that, awesome book.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent book about Oracle's performance.
Review: This is the best Performance and Tuning book about Oracle that I have read. The order of the chapters, is how you must exactly follow the Performance and Tuning process to reach the best performance of your system. The OS tuning chapter explains the most useful commands that a Oracle's Dba must to know to monitor the system. It has a deep section about the Raid's description. It starts each chapter with the Myth & Folklore and the Fact section which describes some bad myths about the Oracle's performance. Thanks to Gaja Krishna, Kirtikumar and John to give and share us your experience in this excellent book.
Rating: 
Summary: Not good enough - 8i only
Review: Two stars may be a little harsh; I'm sure the author is very knowledgable. However, there is a difference between making a lot of true statements and imparting knowledge to someone else (explaining). First, be warned the book only is relevant to Oracle 7 and 8i. Oracle 9 tuning is not addressed. A lot has changed in Oracle 9 because of the automatic tuning features, so I feel this book is out of date and it is shameful that book sellers disguise this fact. There is a lot wrong with this book from the standpoint of someone who needs to tune Oracle. If you are a full time DBA and spend a lot of time studying Oracle and Oracle is your life, then perhaps this is a useful book for your collection. In that respect, the "101" in the title is perhaps accurate - it opens the subjects that you will need to dig a lot deeper into in order to really get something useful done. However, if you need a guide to tuning your Oracle database, you probably will be lost and frustrated using this book. The author in opening chapters lays out a tuning methodology which is basically "measure performance; locate bottleneck; tune appropriate component". Then he pretty much abandons that methodology and stuffs the book with brief descriptions of how Oracle does this and that, some related parameters, and some very general advice to wrap it up. But unless you take it much further yourself with other references and deep study, you will be hard pressed to know how to fix anything. Many Oracle books I have come across suffer from the problem of being either 3 times too long or 1/3 as long as necessary. In other words, the author needs to choose a useful format: either simply provide an overview roadmap to more detailed information, or go the distance and provide a detailed enough amount of information to get the job done. This author similarly needs more or less to make this text useful. I can't say the book is useless. Occasionally the author does give a brief formula or rule of thumb for sizing some parameter. But they are few and far between, and usually not in very important areas. What most of us need is a "Tuning Guide". That is, a step-by-step methodology where measurements are taken and parameters are estimated based on the measurements for tuning the database. Iterative tuning may be required, but that's OK if it is layed out as such. As you work your way through the methodology, your Oracle instance and application come into "tune". I don't know if such a methology can be designed; experts may claim it requires "intuition" and "experience". If so, then don't bother writing a book; otherwise, it is the author's job to turn intuition and experience into a methodology that others can follow. If a "Tuning Guide" is not the intent of the author but rather more deep understanding, then the author must follow the approach of building a crystal clear "model" of the system which identifies measurement parameters for estimating the state of a real system and identifies the "control parameters" which affect the performance of the system. Then the reader should be able to measure the system and perhaps deduce how to control the performance. This book falls far short of that goal. Here is an example from the book that left me helpless: "CAUTION: It is very counterproductive to Oracle system performance to over-allocate memory to one or more components of your shared pool. Over-allocation of memory here can and will cause significant parsing delays (in some cases we have noticed ten-minute response times for a query such as - select * from dual;)." Then the author does not provide any real criteria as to when I might be straying into such a disasterous region. He goes on to talk about "free memory" for various shared pool area pools, and on careful study you might deduce that too much "free memory" could be a related problem, but then rather than give any formulas or hard advice, he covers his "bases" with the wishy-washy statement: "The key here is to manage the space appropriately and make use of all the available pools in your version of Oracle." I'd love to - tell me how! I won't dwell on his erratic writing style which frequently tosses in chirpy lingo such as the subheading: "Hey, Oracle - What Is Your Plan of Action (P.O.A.)?". His use of analogies is weak and half-hearted such as his analogy for resource contention with "children all wanting the same toy". Basically, you know when you have a killer book that is a great tool in your toolkit. This one ain't it.
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