Oracle8 Administration and Management [With Includes Software to Help Manage Your Onw Database]

This book remains one of the foremost Oracle reference books in the market. Mike is a GREAT script writer, and he has always had a reputation for digging into the bowels of Oracle.

Once you get past the author's ego (all the wonderful applications he's created or the tests he's created), the book is extremely thorough. But when I gave his test of what a DBA should know to the other seven "full charge" DBAs in my office, none of them passed (which also shows he believes he is the smartest DBA in the world).He might be smart, but he's not organized. When I read the chapter on table administration, he started with railroad diagrams of the syntax. This was followed by a jumble of clauses in no particular order (not even in the same order as shown in the railroad diagrams). I would have preferred to see clauses grouped at least by the type of table being created (partition table, index table, etc).There are minor errors in the code printed in the book (like NVL() changing to NIL()). That's to be expected. But when you go to the CD-ROM to get the "real" source code (supposedly without the errors), you find that the source code ! is in PDF (Adobe Acrobat) format rather than in editable ASCII text. That means you have to manually type the scripts in yourself. In fact, the only value in the CD is that it contains demo versions of software (which the author helped write) that you are expected to purchase.However, in spite of its downside, the book is chock full of useful information ... if you want to spend the time organizing it yourself. It's obvious the author simply patched in Oracle8 changes to an Oracle7 book.