Rating: 
Summary: Not enough.
Review: Not enough information ! It's only an overview, it doesn't goes enough deeper.
Rating: 
Summary: Focused on a single topic and covers it exceptionally well
Review: Steve Adams has collected and assembled a compendium of facts about a difficult aspect of Oracle: waits, latches, locks and meemory. His clearly written explanations will not only provide DBAs with an in-depth understanding of how these fit into the overall scheme of Oracle's design, but also will allow them to troubleshoot and resolve problems that would exasperate all but the demi-gods. Although the book would have benefited from a lot more than the two illustrations he saw fit to provide, his generous use of tables goes a long way towards making an obtuse subject clear. I would have liked more examples than the outputs he uses to show results of queries, but the lack of illustrations and better examples did not prevent me from undertanding every topic presented.My wishlist notwithstanding, this book merits five stars because it provides a wealth of information and knowledge that you just can't find elsewhere. If you're an Oracle DBA you need this book.
Rating:
Summary: Focused on a single topic and covers it exceptionally well
Review: Steve Adams has collected and assembled a compendium of facts about a difficult aspect of Oracle: waits, latches, locks and meemory. His clearly written explanations will not only provide DBAs with an in-depth understanding of how these fit into the overall scheme of Oracle's design, but also will allow them to troubleshoot and resolve problems that would exasperate all but the demi-gods. Although the book would have benefited from a lot more than the two illustrations he saw fit to provide, his generous use of tables goes a long way towards making an obtuse subject clear. I would have liked more examples than the outputs he uses to show results of queries, but the lack of illustrations and better examples did not prevent me from undertanding every topic presented. My wishlist notwithstanding, this book merits five stars because it provides a wealth of information and knowledge that you just can't find elsewhere. If you're an Oracle DBA you need this book.
Rating: 
Summary: An excellent base for advance tuning
Review: The first book i have read which explains the "why" part of the tuning, not just the "do this to achieve that" thing. This book makes you ready for the tuning adventure, cant wait for the next book by steve. One minus point is the lack of diagrams to help understand the memory structures better.
Rating: 
Summary: All theory, no meat
Review: There is a lot of theory (really a lot of conjectures since none of the theories expounded have been documented by Oracle) in this book and no meat. I did not get any practical information out of this book. At a 120 pages, it makes for a nice bedtime fairy tale. This is definitely the worst O'Reilly book I have ever seen (I own 16 of them).
Rating:
Summary: Superficial
Review: This book does not really go too deep into Oracle internals. More information on the subject is available anyway from metalink or white papers. Without access to Oracle's source code it is impossible to write a real book on Oracle internals and reading this book, it didn't seem likely that the author had access to such information.
Rating:
Summary: The ONLY book which speaks about Oracle's Internals
Review: This book is tragetted to readers who are interested in Advanced Performance Tuning. This speaks about what oracle does behind the doors. Its targetted to people who are interested in learning internals of Oracle database engine.
Rating:
Summary: A book on internals without access to internals
Review: This book misses the point on quite a lot of the Oracle internal structures. Obviously the author had little access to Oracle development and it is difficult to write a book on Oracle "internals" without access to Oracle "inside" information.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Work!
Review: This is a well done and well written advanced book on tuning at the lowest level of Oracle. I highly recommend it for the advanced DBAs out there! Great job Steve!
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Book on Oracle Internals - Never explained better
Review: To research, test and explain such great detail of information that has never been done by anyone before explains the dedication, knowledge and experience of the author. My experience has been on the Oracle Rdb side until the past 3-4 years. Under Oracle Rdb this information was more easily available. But with Oracle I had tried very hard until I came across this book. Good source of information that Oracle, to my knowledge has not disclosed. Must read before tuning the specific sessions.
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