Oracle Insights: Tales of the Oak Table

Rating:
Summary: Excellent first chapter
Review: The book is aimed squarely at an existing Oracle user. It offers idiosyncratic viewpoints devoted to filling in gaps in the official Oracle documentation. The authors are longtime Oracle experts who offer advice on how to optimally use various Oracle versions, and how to avoid potential pitfalls in usage. Being a mostly MySql user myself, there was little here germane to my database operations.

But the first chapter stands well apart from the rest of the book. A behind the scenes history. Presumably unfettered by Oracle's corporate lawyers. A fascinating warts and all technical commentary on the development of the Oracle database. [And there are plenty of warts.] It can and probably should be read by anyone in the database field. Enough technical details are given to illustrate the best and worst features of each major Oracle release. Yet during all this 25 years, Oracle rose from nothing to being the world's largest database company. They must have been getting crucial capabilities implemented correctly. The first chapter is a good complement to other books on Oracle that are written for a general audience. Those books describe more of the business/corporate side of Oracle. Of necessity, they had to go easy on the technical details. This chapter helps fill in those gaps. Also makes one wonder what a similar description of IBM's dB2 history would say.

Rating:
Summary: A niche book for Oracle internals experts
Review: This book is intended for Oracle internals experts who want a deep, deep drill down into the guts of Oracle to look for optimizations. It's well written and very in-depth, but you should have a look at the table of contents to make sure that you can get anything out of this book before you buy it. If you aren't the target audience then you are likely to get little or nothing out of it.

Rating:
Summary: Exellenct series of essays
Review: This book is not designed to teach you anything about programming, database administration, or architecture. It is an excellent series of essays about real life professional experiences. Two essays stand out above all the others. The first essay in the book about the evolution of the Oracle database provides excellent insites into how the database has changed over time.
The other article that stands out is the last one by Tim Gorman about the worst project he has ever been on. The project was run so badly it put a young company out of business. Having been on a $100m+ defense contract that was cancelled in midstream, I can identify with alot of the mistakes in the book.(that project has now failed twice and is on its third contractor... your tax money at work).
Another interesting article was the one by James Morle detailing the trials and tribulations of using Oracle's newly released Parallel Server application in the early 1990s. He had 50 concurrent bugs open with Oracle support at the same time. I thought I had it bad when I had 6 open at once last spring and was told by Oracle Support, 'Good news, we have a fix. It will be out in September'. We had a deadline of July for an application that was required by the FCC in support of a multi-billion dollar merger. Doesn't that make you feel all warm and fuzzy?


Rating:
Summary: You will see Oracle RDBMS differently
Review: You will certainly get very useful insights into managing Oracle RDBMS (up to version 10g). This book is worth every penny you are going to pay for it. I would say it is like oracles of Oracle speak! The list of authors (every one of them wrote a separate chapter) speaks for itself. Enjoy! (Your spouse might not like this book because unless you read every page of it, you won't put it down).