Oracle Design: The Definitive Guide: The Definitive Guide

"Oracle Design" covers the classic steps to accomplish a complete and comprehensive relational database design. This is a book for designers that DBAs should also read. The authors' strengths are that they know what they are discussing and capture it as recommendations and ideas that can be proven with explicit examples. Why read a book published in 1997? Answer is because it is a smart coherent discussion of all of the key factors, from modeling, normalization (when to and when not to), performance, keys & indexes, loading & unloading, different architectures. They do a very sharp job of covering use of nulls. Of special interest is the chapter on temporal data, a characteristic known as "data effectively", designing for values as a point in time. In the data warehouse world, using time dimension is a significant dilemma. We can overlook the dated reference to 3GL tools, swap in knowing that today OLAP tools are a consideration. The book also covers the physical aspects of designing for efficient queries, security and audit trails. The publisher should support the reader by expanding the index and including a CD in the next release in order to make the excellent examples retrievable electronically. For those of us that became hooked on RDBMS because of the improvements offered by Oracle7 series, we can now understand what the big deal is. This book is a solid foundation in the intelligence we need to design effectively for any version of Oracle since rules placed on the server became an option. At full price it would be worth the money but it available at a discount. A very excellent purchase if there are any copies left after I recommend it to my students.

By far, the most entertaining Oracle book I have read (and re-read). The book could benefit from some proof-reading and typo-fixing. But it is an excellent reference, and a useful resource for anybody in or interviewing for an Oracle Designer/Developer kind of job.

With this book, the authors help bring focus to the physical design phase. Practical advice can be found that will apply to most RDBMS implementations, and the Oracle-specific topics are "dead on". Though this book covers Oracle v7, their companion "Oracle8 Design Tips" fills the gaps nicely. In my teaching and consulting practice, this book has helped quite a lot. I rarely leave home without it.

A great overview of database concepts and how they apply to Oracle. Well written, in plain, easy to understand language.

I have been Sybase developer for years. Now I am migrating to Oracle world. This is the only book that I read twice so far. It's not only an excellent technical book on Oracle and Database; it's also a great English book and it is fun to read. It is a great feeling to have this kind of book at this price. Great Bargain! Thanks, Dave and Ian.