Effective Oracle by Design

This is one of the best Oracle books I've ever read. The style is different from any book I've ever read. Most of the Oracle books are feature centric, while this (as the name implies) is more design centric. In addition to design, it is interesting to see his methodology for proving his assertions. So many times in my career, I've been asked questions about design, and I've had a hard time articiluating why it should be done one way and not another. Typically the alternative is so bizzare, I've never even considered why other than "its just not right". His explainations to the "make everything varchar2(4000)" and the "have the application do all the validations" scenarios made me laugh out loud. The ETL developer on one of my projects wanted to take that exact approach. I've also never read a book that went into such detail about the Cost Based Optimizer, which was very interesting. Can't wait to get my hands on "one-on-one", I hope it's more of the same.

If you've ever looked over anything about the Oracle database, you've likely come across the name of this book's author, Tom Kyte. Like his articles, this book is designed to help the reader get the most out of the Oracle database. This is an excellent book for understanding the inner workings of Oracle database engine.The theme of this book is that by understanding how Oracle works, you can write highly scalable, high performing applications. If you don't know how your database works, you'll always be frustrated and less likely to have a well-performing database. The author is absolutely serious about this point and drives it home by dispelling many myths surrounding Oracle (e.g. partitioning is always better than not partitioning). By discussing these technical details, the reader is equipped with the knowledge to build an application designed to perform.If you're looking for a book to learn how to write effective PL/SQL, then you might be slightly disappointed by this book. While there is a great chapter on the Oracle specifics of writing SQL, this book is designed to architecting the entire database, not just the SQL statements run inside the database. I think this a very effective (and sadly novel) approach to database design. There are all too many books out there which concentrate on writing fast SQL, with little regard for the underlying data design and structure.This is by far the best book I have read on understanding how Oracle works. The author covers everything from design to disaster recovery. If you are responsible for maintaining an Oracle database, I would highly recommend this book.

My only complaint was that the book was just too short. As I got closer to the end I could feel the disappointment grow as I knew I would finish soon. The book is that good. I promise that halfway through the book your confidence in Oracle and in yourself as an Oracle developer will improve. If you have his first book Expert:One on One you will want this book. If you get this book you will want his first. They are filled with Oracle solutions and facts, not myths, not silly rules of thumb, not opinions. Backed up with examples and bencharked test results.

Of course, the best Oracle book ever is "Expert One-on-One Oracle" also by Tom Kyte, but being second is still being a head and shoulders above any other Oracle book. Tom's books, both of them, really do show you how to be successful with Oracle. Again and again, chapter after chapter, he shows you how find the information, how to create packages, and how to test. If you did nothing but type in the examples he gives you on testing (they all work, by the way), you would easily justify buying both this book and dinner for Tom (which is not required). There are few books that boost your skills by a quantum measure, but this is one. Tom's emphasis on testing at a low level of development, is the only way to insure that you are not wasting money on a non scalable application. Most of us do not know how easy it is to do small-time and big-time bench marking, so it does not get done often enough. This book shows you every step, from setting up your environment, to tests that really work. There is nothing missing that would keep you from understanding what he is doing, why it is meaningful, and how you can do the same thing. Tom does not assume you have any particular knowledge, he shows you how, in a way that engineers of any level can follow. One thing the book does not do, is describe a huge project that Tom did. Books that do that are rarely much good for anything but the same project. What this book does do, is take the questions you might have about current topics relating to enterprise level applications, and work you through many iterations of the basic Oracle designs and tools you will need to be successful on any project, not just one he did. Finally, if you just type in the examples, it will be a great series of lessons, and well worth doing, but there is much more to learn, and most of it is free. Tom points out Oracle documentation that you should read, that you must read to be really good, and all of it is on the net. If you read Tom's books, you will be better than a lot of developers or DBAs, but reading at least part of what Tom has read to get where he is, is the only way to get the most out of his books and Oracle. This book is written in such detail that it has a lot for every skill level, it is not over your head, and certainly not beneath you. You can use this book to do better work, starting from any level. Tom Kyte has one of the best grasps of Oracle, and he is certainly the best instructor, teaching many of Oracle's best developers. This is a chance to the same kind of instruction, at a much lower cost.

The previous work by the same author, "Expert one-on-one: Oracle", got an average of 5/5 stars and more than 50 reviews, which is of course an outstanding result for any book, but especially for books about Oracle, which aren't normally so well-received by the readers community (to say the least). Well, I'm sure that this book is going to get the same success. Thomas Kyte is well known for being an excellent writer, and in fact the material is presented here in a clear, concise yet complete manner, and it's very easy to follow the discussion and reproduce the examples. The examples themselves are one of the greatest strengths of this book, because they illustrate, and prove, the topics discussed (and so what is written is *reliable*, which is of course a fundamental property for any technical book, but a quality seldom found in other Oracle tomes). At the same time, the examples (written mostly in SQL and PL/SQL) teach you a lot about how to code appropriately (the Author being a well-known SQL guru), showing e.g. syntactic variations, useful Oracle-supplied packages, new Oracle extensions ... I strongly believe that in order to be a good developer you must be exposed to high quality code, and reading this book is an excellent way to achieve this (well, I learnt more about SQL and PL/SQL from Thomas Kyte's books than from other books dedicated exclusively to SQL and PL/SQL programming).The book is also magic - it can read your mind. Yes, I had in store a couple of non-trivial questions to be asked on asktom.oracle.com, and I found the answers in the book! Well, this magic property comes straight from the Author's experience in answering thousands of technical question on his aforementioned web site, asked by Oracle developers and DBAs all around the world - so it's not surprising that the book is tuned with what people think, and need to know, about Oracle. I would say that this is a feature present only in Thomas Kyte's books, since there is simply no other place like asktom.To sum up - this book and "Expert one-on-one: Oracle" are overall the best books about Oracle I've read, and I own more than 15 of them. I can't remember all the times that I've used the latter book in my work as an Oracle specialist, and I've already used a lot of things learnt from this book as well. I absolutely recommend both this and "Expert one-on-one: Oracle".