Oracle Design

Rating:
Summary: For Designers, techies and smart users
Review: "Oracle Design" covers the classic steps to accomplish a complete and comprehensive relational database design. This is a book for designers that DBAs should also read. The authors' strengths are that they know what they are discussing and capture it as recommendations and ideas that can be proven with explicit examples. Why read a book published in 1997? Answer is because it is a smart coherent discussion of all of the key factors, from modeling, normalization (when to and when not to), performance, keys & indexes, loading & unloading, different architectures. They do a very sharp job of covering use of nulls. Of special interest is the chapter on temporal data, a characteristic known as "data effectively", designing for values as a point in time. In the data warehouse world, using time dimension is a significant dilemma. We can overlook the dated reference to 3GL tools, swap in knowing that today OLAP tools are a consideration. The book also covers the physical aspects of designing for efficient queries, security and audit trails. The publisher should support the reader by expanding the index and including a CD in the next release in order to make the excellent examples retrievable electronically. For those of us that became hooked on RDBMS because of the improvements offered by Oracle7 series, we can now understand what the big deal is. This book is a solid foundation in the intelligence we need to design effectively for any version of Oracle since rules placed on the server became an option. At full price it would be worth the money but it available at a discount. A very excellent purchase if there are any copies left after I recommend it to my students.

Rating:
Summary: Well written overview of Oracle 7
Review: A great overview of database concepts and how they apply to Oracle. Well written, in plain, easy to understand language.

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Summary: Unique book on Design
Review: By far, the most entertaining Oracle book I have read (and re-read). The book could benefit from some proof-reading and typo-fixing. But it is an excellent reference, and a useful resource for anybody in or interviewing for an Oracle Designer/Developer kind of job.

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Summary: Excellent Database Desgin book that I have ever found!
Review: I have been Sybase developer for years. Now I am migrating to Oracle world. This is the only book that I read twice so far. It's not only an excellent technical book on Oracle and Database; it's also a great English book and it is fun to read. It is a great feeling to have this kind of book at this price. Great Bargain! Thanks, Dave and Ian.

Rating:
Summary: Over-priced, poor text, suitable only for a novice
Review: I purchased the book, Oracle Design, largely because it had thus far been highly rated with five stars by other reviewers at Amazon.Com. In that regard, I feel cheated because there is nothing in the book that will help any person other than a novice become a better Oracle database programmer, but even then, there exists better titles from which a novice can learn from.

Specifically, the book has little, if any, content that would be of interest to any person other than the most inexperienced computer programmer, since its content is restricted to common sense issues that should already be well understood by any person who has any programming experience whatsoever.

The author has nothing worthwhile to say, but instead just rambles on and on, such that I must now question the author's motive for writing the book in the first place because he seems to be without purpose.

For both beginners and experienced Oracle programmers alike, your money would be better spent buying other Oracle books because there are indeed other Oracle books available that are definitely worth buying, but Oracle Design is not one of them.

Rating:
Summary: Good ideas, bad presentation
Review: I was required to purchase and use this book for an Oracle database design class.

Although the authors are experienced DBAs and have good ideas on database design and implementation, they convey their ideas rather poorly. They don't deal with topics one at a time and jump from one idea to the next at times within one paragraph. This book has good ideas, but one has to read this book several times and also must be an intermediate to an advanced level Oracle developer to get the most out of it.

Rating:
Summary: Straight Advice from Serious Designers
Review: With this book, the authors help bring focus to the physical design phase. Practical advice can be found that will apply to most RDBMS implementations, and the Oracle-specific topics are "dead on". Though this book covers Oracle v7, their companion "Oracle8 Design Tips" fills the gaps nicely. In my teaching and consulting practice, this book has helped quite a lot. I rarely leave home without it.