Oracle Applications DBA Field Guide

I am just getting into Oracle Applications. Traditionally, I always read the Oracle Documentation . . . (RTFM). I bought this book for the purpose of getting a high level view before getting into the Oracle Docs. This book is well laid and reads very easily. The author also points to various Metalink articles which is a nice touch.

A lot of folks, when they talk about tech books, start right in with details, correctness, and comments on depth and so on. I'd like to tell you that this book is an enjoyable read. Phelps and Jackson are good writers, and they breakdown concepts and details into an easy to use handbook or "field guide". As I move into more Applications implementations, I have found this book to be indispensible for day-to-day answers. What do I like? The book is organized well, with nice coverage of a diverse suite of software. It offers suggestions like clearing the JAR cache, purging concurrent requests, and workflow history, and so on. What I also really like is it has an excellent chapter on both what to monitor, and complete scripts to do it with. In the database, those include listener, logfiles, db up/down, idle sessions, long running sessions, high active sessions, blocking sessions, tablespace usage, extent issues & profile changes. Also scripts to monitor apache, jvm, forms, concurrent manager, OS cpu & load average are included. I have a couple of small caveats as well. If you're a real newbie to Oracle Apps + Oracle in general, this is probably not the book for you. Also although there is some coverage of Unix in chapter 6 toolkit, I'd say if you're not strong with Unix already, this chapter won't help much. Also chapter 7 resources, was a bit of a letdown. They mention IOUG, OAUG as organizations, and related conferences, and Oracle's own site and a couple of others, but there are tons of blogs out there, and I would have liked to be pointed to the ones the authors recommend or favor most. Also the book list recommendations are decent, but mostly in the Oracle Database arena, and since I'm already an accomplished DBA, I have all those books! Also the Performance chapter mentions hitratios, which is almost considered taboo in the Oracle world these days, and didn't get into more depth with the Wait Interface and so on. In summary I really enjoy this book for it's great writing style, quick coverage, best practices, and troubleshooting recommendations. The only thing I'd say as a reservation is, when it comes to more in depth performance tuning of the db, there are other books that can give you a more detail and specifics. Enjoy!

This is the type of book I was looking for when I entered the Oracle Apps DBA field 2 years ago. Anyone who has used MetaLink to find this information knows that, at times, it can be difficult to find all the information you need. Often, you have to read through multiple notes and combine pieces of information from each of them to find your answer. Phelps and Jackson have done an excellent job of bringing together much of the essential information an Apps DBA needs to perform his/her duties. The chapters on monitoring and tuning were especially helpful. These chapters stress the importance of proactive monitoring to head off potential issues, and give examples of what to monitor as well as scripts that can be used to perform the monitoring. And, as the above reviewer stated, I have turned to this book multiple times as a quick "How does that work/Where is that file" resource. I strongly recommend this book for anyone who is new to this field; had this book been out 2 years ago, my learning curve would have been much shallower. I also believe that those with years of experience in this field will benefit from the depth and conciseness of the information in the Orale Applications DBA Field Guide. Phelps and Jackson are both well respected in their field, and this book shows why.

There are relatively few books that have been published for DBA's that run the 11i Oracle Applications. Well, now we have a good one for our bookshelves... This book was an easy read and kept me engaged throughout the various topics. I especially appreciated the specific metalink note references within the chapters which allowed me to gather more detailed information straight from Oracle. DBA's that have been involved with the Oracle Apps for awhile will get a refresher to things they may have learned and forgotten over the years as well as getting a solid explanation of the newer features for 11i; while newer DBA's with get well written explanations of the componentry needed to run the Apps. This book can also be a great desk reference for those quick "... how does that work..." questions. I would highly recommend this book to anyone wanting to learn more about the Apps DBA job.