Rating: 
Summary: I should have known better ...
Review: ... than to spend money on this book. It was released prior to the 10g production release and suffers from being based on the beta release and not checked against the final release/feature set. Also the layout is poor, at the same standard as other Rampant press books I've seen. Illustrations looks like they're photo-copied. I'd recommend waiting for Robert Freeman's 10g New Features book. RF's RMAN and 9i New Features books were great, I am sure the 10g one will be a winner.
Rating: 
Summary: Burleson does it again
Review: Good overview of 10g new features but not much detail to backup examples. Book was too much like beta estudies almost word for word. Looks like he was trying to be first to market on this one. Skip it and wait for others with more detailed examples.
Rating:
Summary: Very poorly written
Review: I am appalled by the low quality of this book. The writing is weak and the examples are poor. Some features are described for many pages with many very similar examples and others entirely lack examples or explanation. There are plenty of cases when the book directly contradicts itself (p78 the database size is 8 million G in the table and 8 million T in the text; p82 there are 11 platforms in the table but the text says that there are only 9;...) In short, it appears that the book was never proofread.
Rating: 
Summary: Very Nice Coverage
Review: I am in the 10g beta program and I was happy to see that the authors kept their focus on only the 10g features that are important.Many other new feature book want to cover all new features even if they are not important. Mike Ault has done an excellent job with this book and all of the 10g features are explained in the context of how they will help improve database functions.
Rating: 
Summary: Good reference on 10g New Features...after all!!
Review: I was on my way to write more or less a negative review of this book, however I changed my mind and now I really think that this book is a *good* reference after all. Why?
First title on Oracle 10g new features that I read was Robert Freeman's book. With modest 200+ pages it's an excellent introductory kind of text and nothing more, it's far from being considered as a reference (or complete) guide to 10g new features. On the other hand Mr. Ault, Liu and Tumma's book has from the very beginning the ambition to be a true REFERENCE, as complete as possible (they even write some short introduction about new bioinformatics features included in 10g!!). It is amazing how many information they managed to compile and present in detail, especially considering the timing - short beta cycle of 10g and obvious "gold rush" of the publisher (shame on you ;-). Sometimes their explanations are a little beat too verbose and tedious (repetitive) for my taste - sort the writing style that we're familiar in Oracle manuals.
The worst thing about this book is the lack of proper technical editing. At first, I was convinced that this book was not edited at all, or that authors reviewed each other's chapters. Then I noticed Mike's comment in which he mentioned that someone from Oracle reviewed the book. Ahh...that explains everything, they barely cope with their own official manuals and now they're helping others ;->. How bad is it? Not as bad to bash it altogether....anyway, I saved some funny comments for the end of my review, they're made by the "editor" of the book (I guess?) and were left unchanged, ended in the final print...page 445: "Not sure what you mean by example....Could you give a complete example here?" or on page 447: "Give a working example - LEVEL clause is missing and you should add parenthesis".
Rating:
Summary: Tightly-focused coverage
Review: I'm a great fan of Mike Ault, Madhu Tumma and Daniel Liu, and I am happy to see that this book is more than just an end-to-end description of each Oracle10g feature.
As the title says, this book focuses only of the Oracle 10g features relating to "advanced tuning and administration" and it has carefully selected only those Oracle 10g new features that are the most important to the practicing Oracle professional. This book has helped me separate the "fluffy" new features from the important new features.
I highly recommend this book for several reasons:
1 - The ability and reputation of the authors (especially with Oracle 10g new features)
2 - The value (lots of book for the price)
3 - The annotation of the usefulness of each Oracle10g new feature
4 - The real-world approach to the 10g new features - not much theory
Because I was honored to help edit the book, I may be prejudiced but I think it has excellent overall coverage and I especially like how the focus is on the IMPORTANT 10g new features, and not just a item-by-item coverage.
Rating:
Summary: Tightly-focused coverage
Review: I'm a great fan of Mike Ault, Madhu Tumma and Daniel Liu, and I am happy to see that this book is more than just an end-to-end description of each Oracle10g feature. As the title says, this book focuses only of the Oracle 10g features relating to "advanced tuning and administration" and it has carefully selected only those 10g features that are the most important to the practicing Oracle professional. This book has helped me separate the "fluffy" new features from the important new features. I highly recommend this book for several reasons: 1 - The ability and reputation of the authors
2 - The value (lots of book for the price)
3 - The annotation of the usefulness of each new feature
4 - The real-world approach to the content - not much theory
Rating: 
Summary: Sergey Isenko
Review: It is much worse, than everything, what I read about Oracle before.
Generally it is the copied original documentation.
Practically there are no normal examples.
So sorry.
Rating:
Summary: questions to the authors and a doubt to the book
Review: May I ask a couple of questions to your book "new features of 10g" ?
The book says:
"In general, if the library cache ratio is over 1, you should consider adding to the shared_pool_size. Library cache misses occur during the parsing and preparation of the execution plans for SQL statements. "
Then the book gave us the statistics as follows:
Cache Misses Library Cache
Yr. Mo Dy Hr. execs While Executing Miss Ratio
---------------- ---------- --------------- ---------------
2001-12-11 10 10,338 3 .00029
2001-12-12 10 182,477 134 .00073
2001-12-14 10 190,707 202 .00106
2001-12-16 10 2,803 11 .00392
Then the book says:
"In the preceding example, you see a clear RAM shortage in the shared pool between 10:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. each day. In this case, you could dynamically reconfigure the shared pool with additional RAM memory from the db_cache_size during this period. " So, first, the statistics didn't give us 'The library cache ratio". I only saw "the library cache miss ratio". Do
you mean that 'The library cache ratio" = "the library cache miss ratio" ?
second, "you see a clear RAM shortage", but why ? I saw library cache miss ratio only has 0.00392 (< 1).
Actually, I read only chapter one. I saw more unclear staff. So, last question, is it the whole book like this way ?
Rating:
Summary: questions to the authors and a doubt to the book
Review: May I ask a couple of questions to your book "new features of 10g" ?
The book says:
"In general, if the library cache ratio is over 1, you should consider adding to the shared_pool_size. Library cache misses occur during the parsing and preparation of the execution plans for SQL statements. "
Then the book gave us the statistics as follows:
Cache Misses Library Cache
Yr. Mo Dy Hr. execs While Executing Miss Ratio
---------------- ---------- --------------- ---------------
2001-12-11 10 10,338 3 .00029
2001-12-12 10 182,477 134 .00073
2001-12-14 10 190,707 202 .00106
2001-12-16 10 2,803 11 .00392
Then the book says:
"In the preceding example, you see a clear RAM shortage in the shared pool between 10:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m. each day. In this case, you could dynamically reconfigure the shared pool with additional RAM memory from the db_cache_size during this period. " So, first, the statistics didn't give us 'The library cache ratio". I only saw "the library cache miss ratio". Do
you mean that 'The library cache ratio" = "the library cache miss ratio" ?
second, "you see a clear RAM shortage", but why ? I saw library cache miss ratio only has 0.00392 (< 1).
Actually, I read only chapter one. I saw more unclear staff. So, last question, is it the whole book like this way ?
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