Practical Oracle8i?: Building Efficient Databases

I have dozens of Oracle books and this the single best one. I think I'm going to get extra copies so I can assign reading it to everyone who works for me. The content should be the basic starting point of knowledge for serious development and management. I just wish it was updated for 9i

I can't imagine a better introduction to the Oracle RDBMS. The author's conversational style is more akin to a discussion among colleagues, rather than a professor lecturing a student. A quick scan of the table of contents reveals a clearly organized sequence of topics, making it easy for the reader to dive into a subject of particular interest. By randomly scanning through a half dozen chapters, I was able to quickly develop a solid feel for Oracle's implementation of tables, objects, partitioning, indexing, and data integrity. This text provides a great overview of the Oracle RDBMS, and a solid foundation for any potential database administrators.

This may be the best Oracle book I've found so far.A lot of books seem to give canned explanations of how oracle works - geared towards rote memorization as opposed to understanding. This book does a great job of taking the next step.For example, The detail with which the author goes through the process of how updating a row actually works in an Oracle database was tremendous. His explanation of how a select statement could actually cause a row to be marked as committed ( i.e. a read causes a write ) was great. I've only been a DBA (or pseudo-DBA) for about 6 months now, so I'm certainly no expert in this area. Yet I found all of his explanations very clear and easy to understand. If you're looking for a new Oracle book, get this one.

Unlike many other weighty tomes regarding Oracle, this book does much more than reword the 8i Concepts manual. There is a lot in this book, but if you just read the "Problems & Quirks" and "Strategy Notes" sections at the end of each chapter you'll be well on your way to understanding the implications of using 8i features.One concern many people have when experimenting with database features is how to be sure it's working properly. Jonathan's book goes a long way to help with this as with most of his examples, some low-level tracing or queries are provided to prove the point.Overall, a superbly detailed and valuable addition to my Oracle library.

Whatever the job, Oracle offers many different ways to do it, and they are not all equal. This book is an invaluable aid in deciding which features to choose and how to use them. Each feature is clearly explained with some real-world illustrations of how it might be used. The author then examines the potential functionality, performance, security, and maintenance traps associated with the feature and concludes with some helpful guidelines on when and how to use it (or not). The style is relaxed and personal, but there is no lack of technical accuracy, and although the main arguments and recommendations are accessible to relative newcomers to Oracle, many of the detailed explanations assume considerable familiarity with Oracle system architecture and performance issues. In summary, this book is particularly valuable for people who are designing new Oracle-based systems, but has plenty of practical advice for all Oracle developers and DBAs.