Rating: 
Summary: An Excellent Manual for Statspack
Review: Statspack is one of the best Oracle provided tuning utilities to be released. However, Statspack is a complex program to install, run and most importantly, understand the output from. In this book Don leads the reader through the installation, setup and use of the Statspack packages. In addition Don shares numerous scripts and techniques for expanding Statspack to allow the user to monitor system and disk related statsitics as well as database internal statistics. Over all an excellent book for both the beginner and advanced DBA who wants to get up to speed on the Oracle Statspack package in the shortest possible time.
Rating:
Summary: Comprehensive Tuning Guide
Review: The title belies the scope of this terrific book which is really a comprehensive approach to Oracle tuning. It's not just a "How-To-Do-Statspack" book but it covers Oracle tuning from top to bottom including: tuning the environment (server, disk, network), tuning the Oracle instance (SGA), tuning Oracle objects (tables, indexes, segments), and finding and tuning problem SQL statements. From an "everything-that-touches-Oracle" perspective the author ties it all together with metrics from statspack. Most authors barely make mention of tuning Oracle for the network but I found some great Net8 tuning advice right away. It also comes with tuning tips for PQO and OPS. Some may think the top down approach de-emphasizes SQL tuning but not so. The author even tells how to tune 3rd party applications where you can't touch the underlying SQL code. The book comes with lots of scripts and the author shows how you can do trend analysis with Excel. You can even graph your own performance metrics with free packages like "RRDtool" and other free web-based graphing tools. You can spend $1000's on a 3rd party monitoring package and still not understand tuning or you can buy this book, use the scripts and statspack utility that comes with Oracle, tune the database with understanding, then observe and document the improvements you made with captured statistics. This is a roll up your sleaves kind of book.
Rating:
Summary: Comprehensive Tuning Guide
Review: The title belies the scope of this terrific book which is really a comprehensive approach to Oracle tuning. It's not just a "How-To-Do-Statspack" book but it covers Oracle tuning from top to bottom including: tuning the environment (server, disk, network), tuning the Oracle instance (SGA), tuning Oracle objects (tables, indexes, segments), and finding and tuning problem SQL statements. From an "everything-that-touches-Oracle" perspective the author ties it all together with metrics from statspack. Most authors barely make mention of tuning Oracle for the network but I found some great Net8 tuning advice right away. It also comes with tuning tips for PQO and OPS. Some may think the top down approach de-emphasizes SQL tuning but not so. The author even tells how to tune 3rd party applications where you can't touch the underlying SQL code. The book comes with lots of scripts and the author shows how you can do trend analysis with Excel. You can even graph your own performance metrics with free packages like "RRDtool" and other free web-based graphing tools. You can spend $1000's on a 3rd party monitoring package and still not understand tuning or you can buy this book, use the scripts and statspack utility that comes with Oracle, tune the database with understanding, then observe and document the improvements you made with captured statistics. This is a roll up your sleaves kind of book.
Rating: 
Summary: About what I expected
Review: This book is a generalized look at tuning performance problems with Oracle's Statspack product. The majority of the examples and scripts are based on the Unix OS. If you are looking for a book on tuning Oracle on Unix, this is not it.... Beginning DBA's will get a fair amount out of this book. While I disagree with the author's methodology to solving performance problems, it would be a roundabout method for Novice DBA's to tune their systems. Experienced DBA's will find little new information in this book. While Don does touch on that statspack package, most of the information comes from his custom scripts. He references the default statspack report very few times and never goes through a comprehensive step-by-step explanation of what everything means....
Rating:
Summary: About what I expected
Review: This book is a generalized look at tuning performance problems with Oracle's Statspack product. The majority of the examples and scripts are based on the Unix OS. If you are looking for a book on tuning Oracle on Unix, this is not it.... Beginning DBA's will get a fair amount out of this book. While I disagree with the author's methodology to solving performance problems, it would be a roundabout method for Novice DBA's to tune their systems. Experienced DBA's will find little new information in this book. While Don does touch on that statspack package, most of the information comes from his custom scripts. He references the default statspack report very few times and never goes through a comprehensive step-by-step explanation of what everything means....
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