Expert Oracle Database Architecture: Oracle Database 9i, 10g, and 11g Programming Techniques and Solutions

Couldn't decide whether to get this or Tom's earlier book "Expert One-on-One Oracle." Got this and was pleased to learn that the earlier book is included as a searchable PDF on the accompanying CD! How can you beat that? My consulting experience has been that most implementers of Oracle don't know what they're doing. Read this and you'll know what you're doing; it has quick little experiments that drive home the most important points --how to make the common cases fast-- with complete explanations. I was already Oracle certified and learned some new wrinkles. You'll know why you paid for Oracle in this day of commoditized, open-source DBMS's.

This is a great book. For the first time I can say I understand how concurrency works in Oracle. The first chapter and the ones about latches and concurrency are great. Besides, Tom has a very nice writing. He mentions some cases based on his experience as a consultant that are really interesting. Every architect/developer working with Oracle should have this book.

I have read several Oracle 10G books before BUT Thomas Kyte's "Expert Oracle Architrecure" is an excellent resource on understanding some very basic concepts to highly technical details. For example: From chapter 2 "Architecture Overview", Tom gave a clear definition on what is a database and what is an instance. I think most of people made mistakes without knowing these details. I would strongly recommend you all to read this book. The same chapter has very technical explanation about memroy structures and networking architecture. I recommend this book to all developers and DBAs who dealt with day to day operations maintaning the databases. I liked the way Tom explained Files from Chapter 3. Is is good to find all configuration files and parameter files at one place and knowing them each individually. Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 are two excellent resources to understand completely about an "ORACLE INSTANCE". Overall I am really happy to have this book and will certainly recommend to my co-workers. Ramesh

Since this book is the first volume of the second edition of "expert one-on-one: Oracle", which I've been reading and re-reading for years, I will review the book by comparing it with the previous edition, hoping to help people who are considering to "upgrade". First thing - if in the first edition you enjoyed the great writing style, the everything-backed-by-examples approach, and the handling of real-life scenarios coming from the (oustanding) experience of the Author ... great news for you: everything is still there, this edition matches (or even surpasses) the first as far as quality is concerned. Second, I've found a lot of new topics/chapters that are brand-new, not to be found in the first edition; for example the coverage of "write consistency", the excellent chapter about "datatypes", the "parallel execution" one - in addition, obviously, to the coverage of new features and objects of 9i/10g (automatic pga management, assm, index/table compression, sorted hash clustered tables, to name just a few). Third, the vast majority (90% or more) of the topics/chapters already present in the first edition have been improved (expanded and/or rewritten for better readability), with new examples and new scenarios - I particularly loved the new discussion about the log buffer/buffer cache interdependencies, the fresh section about "indexing myths", the use of statspack to show the impact of not using bind variables, the new ways to implement optimistic locking, and many others (there are too many to discuss, it really looks like a brand new book - a real "new edition", not just a "new version"). In short - lots of new material, first-edition stuff much improved - I couldn't ask for more or better.

I have a confession to make. I haven't read an Oracle book cover-to-cover in almost three years. Sure I skim through the latest titles for what I need and of course check out documentation of the latest releases. That's what good docs provide, quick reference when you need to check syntax, or details of a particular parameter, or feature, but have you ever read some documentation, sift through a paragraph, page or two, and say to yourself, that's great, but what about this situation I have right now? Unfortunately documentation doesn't always speak to your real everyday needs. It is excellent for reference, but doesn't have a lot of real-world test cases, and practical usage examples. That's where Tom Kyte's new book comes in, and boy is it a killer. I've read Tom's books before, and always enjoyed them. But his new APress title really stands out as an achievement. Page after page and chapter after chapter he uses straightforward examples pasted right from the SQL*Plus prompt to illustrate, demonstrate, and illuminate concepts that he is explaining. It is this practical hands on, relentless approach that makes this book 700 pages of goodness. Already an expert at Oracle? You'll become more of one after reading this book. With reviewers like Jonathan Lewis I expected this book to be good from the outset I have to admit. But each chapter delves into a bit more depth around subjects that are central to Oracle programming and administration. No SCREEN SHOTS! ---------------- One of the things I loved about this book most of all is its complete lack of screenshots! But how does one illustrate a concept then, you might ask? These days with graphical interfaces becoming more and more popular even among technical folks, I run into the question of the command line over an over again. How can you be doing sophisticated database administration of the latest servers running Oracle with the command line? Or another question I often get is, can you really do everything with the command line? The answer to both is a resounding yes, in fact you can do much more with the command line. Luckily for us, Tom is of this school too, and page after page of his book are full of real examples and commands that you can try for yourself, with specific instructions on setting up the environment, using statistics gathering packages, and so on. In an era of computing where GUIs seem to reign like magazines over the best literature of the day, it is refreshing to see some of the best and most technical minds around Oracle still advocate the best tool, command line as the interface of choice. In fact it is the command line examples, and happily the complete lack of screenshots that indeed makes this book a jewel of a find. Audience ----------- As a DBA you might wonder why I'm talking so highly of a book more focused towards developers. There are a couple of reasons. First this book is about the Oracle architecture, as it pertains to developers. In