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Rating: 
Summary: Sybex not as good as Oracle Press book
Review: I bought the Sybex Performance Tuning book. A colleague of mine bought the Oracle Press book. I read both and passed the OCP exam with plenty to spare. While the Sybex book is good, the Oracle Press book is better.
Rating: 
Summary: A good preparation tool
Review: My purpose was to pass the exam and I have done it using this book but also the Osborne book by Ch. Pack.
Both of them are very good books and are complementary. Pros:
- A lot of examples: extracts from statspack reports, screenshots of Oracle Enterprise Manager tools. It's very interesting to understand but it's no use for the exam.
- The exam-based questions are challenging.
- Nearly all you need to know can be found in this book Cons:
- This book doesn't follow Oracle test content checklist. It's all mixed up but there is a good plan table.
- Some chapter are too much detailed, too many parameters for Oracle utilities (eg TKPROF). It's sometime difficult to see what's important to know for the exam. I only had basic questions about those tools nothing about all the options described in the book.
- They are small mistakes: CREATE_STORED_OUTLINES, USE_PRIVATE_OUTLINES and USE_PRIVATE_OUTLINES are stated as initialization parameters but it's not the case (check otn.oracle.com). My advice:
- have a good understanding of Oracle views. I had between 10 and 15 questions relating to views.
- use both books to be well prepared. This exam is quite difficult.
Rating:
Summary: A good preparation tool
Review: My purpose was to pass the exam and I have done it using this book but also the Osborne book by Ch. Pack.
Both of them are very good books and are complementary. Pros:
-A lot of examples: extracts from statspack reports, screenshots of Oracle Enterprise Manager tools. It's very interesting to understand but it's no use for the exam.
-The exam-based questions are challenging.
-Nearly all you need to know can be found in this book Cons:
-This book doesn't follow Oracle test content checklist. It's all mixed up but there is a good plan table.
-Some chapter are too much detailed, too many parameters for Oracle utilities (eg TKPROF). It's sometime difficult to see what's important to know for the exam. I only had basic questions about those tools nothing about all the options described in the book.
-They are small mistakes: CREATE_STORED_OUTLINES, USE_PRIVATE_OUTLINES and USE_PRIVATE_OUTLINES are stated as initialization parameters but it's not the case (check otn.oracle.com). My advice:
-have a good understanding of Oracle views. I had between 10 and 15 questions relating to views.
-use both books to be well prepared. This exam is quite difficult.
Rating:
Summary: Topic well-covered
Review: Thanks to the author. I used this book for my last exam along with the oracle press book. The topic on the exam is completly covered but not according to checklist designed by oracle. But you can still find your way out. I have to admit that the book is really good I like it. It has sufficient details that help a lot. The practice exams questions are also really good. But there is one small mistake that I noticed is the answer to one question related to the alert log file in Unix environment (sometimes the answer is alert_sid.ora and sometimes it is alert_sid.log).
Finally to candidates for the exam, expect to see a lot of questions on the views (performance & data dictionary), latch contentions, initialization parameters, IOT, and Index...
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