Rating: 
Summary: A great book turned into a waste of paper
Review: An earlier version of this book, was my favorite, most referenced Oracle DBA book. I purchased the new edition without a thought.. unfortunately. Book has minimal revision to allow it to be republished, with all the out dated stuff left in. Any other Oracle 9i book will be a better purchase.
Rating: 
Summary: Not for experienced DBA either !!!
Review: I fully agree with the reader from BC, Canada and totally disagree with reader from White Plains, NY. By covering versions from as far back as 7.3, this book is a hodge podge of different versions. There are lot of page filling techniques in addition to listing all those parameters and events. Writes
disproportionate amount of pages for trivial matters like rowsize calculation or syntaxes and loses focus on main topic. In performance tuning section, dealing with multiple versions creates a total mess and you ending up reading about suggestions & parameters that are obsolete. In Database internals tuning chapter, he lists 8 pages of stapacks report (from a lightly used database!!) and doesn't even bother to discuss its different sections. Book does not explain object related topics well. Quality of examples is very poor. I was totally disappointed. Don't buy this book.
Rating: 
Summary: lot of integrity and commitment to his readers
Review: I have 2 years full time experience on Ora 8i & 9i.2 on windows 2000 and winXP german (Admin & programming) plus 3y. of Sybase DBMS. To get the job done, Bought tons of those fat bulky Oracle books of all these gurus (Loney, Urmann, Trezzo, ...) including 9i reference books. A lot of money thrown out!
example: [Oracle9i PL/SQL by Urmann] fully wrong (with Ora 9.2) description of DBMS_Job package.
Advantages of Mike's book in focus here:
1.) If you are in trouble (as usual with Oracle even simple examples sometimes do not work) and you need help it is ONLY Mike Ault who will reply!!! Well to me, that shows a lot of integrity and commitment to his readers. It is exactly what a reader needs when he is looking for new source of knowledge.
2.) Well now for this book: definitely one of the RARE better fat books, improved over its 8i version. I can really recommend to buy this one (Oracle9i Administration and Management).
Excellent coverage of multi disk layout/installation and honest Oracle DBA job interview stuff which is not found in other books at all.
Disadvantages: Maybe too much scripts optionally on the cd-rom for some readers, maybe one needs an "oracle beginners guide" book as well.
Finally, Oracle (9i) Universal Installer and OEM (enterprise mgr) got more foolproof (8i was just a joke), try to install very small systems w/o a book first.
Rating:
Summary: Fantastic DBA reference!
Review: I have been a fan of Mike Ault for over a decade, and I find his writing style very easy-to-understand. This is one of the best Oracle9i book for understanding the new Oracle9i features and seeing the practical application of the features . . .
Rating:
Summary: Fantastic DBA reference!
Review: I have been a fan of Mike Ault for over a decade, and I find his writing style very easy-to-understand. This is one of the best Oracle9i book for understanding the new Oracle9i features and seeing the practical application of the features . . .
Rating:
Summary: Something for Everyone
Review: I'm a pretty experienced DBA, but this book taught me some new tricks on such basics as using Oracle's packaged procedures and utilities. And Ault's stuff on troubleshooting, backup and recovery is very useful. Would highly recommend this to any Oracle DBA--newbies and experienced.
Rating:
Summary: Great for Any Release
Review: I've been a big fan of Mike Ault's over the years, but I've got to say I was impressed by how he's revised this new edition of his Oracle book on administration and management. To be honest, we've just started to plan for deploying 9i, so I wasn't sure I'd find enough in this new edition that I could use now. But Ault has updated this book with a lot of new techniques not in the earlier edition that work with the 8i release we're running. Plus he's revised and added to the more than 200 scripts for automating management tasks---probably the best reason to buy this book.
Rating:
Summary: Not for beginners and not for Learning Oracle
Review: This book is not for beginners and is not suitable for learning Oracle either. Just an example you can sense the style of the book, it spends 15 pages to list all initialization parameters and over 20 pages on undocumented initialization parameters.The explanation of the concepts is too much alike the on-line document. The book used many scripts but few can be found from the download on the book's website. The code you find on the website is what the author used in his work but may not be relevant to someone who uses the book to learn Oracle. The code is not well-organized either. The explanation of the examples and code is inconsistent and sketchy¡ªsometimes very detailed but other times missing major pieces. The book is bulky but not very comprehensive. It has very week coverage on architectures, backup and recovery, and net services. It doesn't cover advanced security features either. It assumes the reader has pretty good knowledge of SQL and PL/SQL. Given what is said, an experienced DBA may find some reference value in it.
Rating:
Summary: Vey nice text
Review: This is the book that I use the most because it explains the issues in a clear way. I am not technical, so having complete examples is important to me, and I enjoy seeing the code listings. The CD with the scripts is also very useful.
Rating:
Summary: Vey nice text
Review: This is the book that I use the most because it explains the issues in a clear way. I am not technical, so having complete examples is important to me, and I enjoy seeing the code listings. The CD with the scripts is also very useful.
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