| Oracle FAQ | Your Portal to the Oracle Knowledge Grid | |
 |
 | |||
| Oracle FAQ | Your Portal to the Oracle Knowledge Grid | |
|
| |||
Home -> Community -> Mailing Lists -> Oracle-L -> RE: Your new book
I don't know exactly how to scope your question, so I'll answer the two
things I think it might mean.
For every chapter except for Chapter 9 (Queueing Theory), even college calculus would be extreme overkill, even if you're looking to *derive* all the formulas in those chapters. Understanding the formulas in Chapters 1-8 and 9-12 requires only that you understand that capital Sigma means "sum."
If you want to dig into the field of queueing theory in more depth, then the level of mathematical background depends on what your goals are. If you want to understand where the formulas come from, then you should probably begin with a good probability and statistics course. This is the foundation of queueing theory.
If you buy a copy of the Gross & Harris queueing theory book (I have a lot of queueing theory books, and this is by far my favorite), you can see where all the formulas come from. Much of the math in G&H is way over my head. I haven't contributed much to the body of queueing theory knowledge except for integrating some pieces from different sources into a coherent plan for Oracle practitioners, offering some commonsense explanations of how to use the stuff, and discovering a couple of bugs in the literature (a big one in Jain's CDF, and a tiny one in G&H's CDF). What I did do, I accomplished with computer science methods, not mathematical ones. You can see what I mean on page 236, which is probably my favorite page in the whole book.
But, as I've said before, you don't have to know how to derive the formulas in order to use them. With the spreadsheet and Perl code I've written (available at oreilly.com), you can solve a large number of problems without even being able to *read* the formulas.
<personal-hypothesis>
I think that some people find the presence of Greek letters jarring
(well, at least Don Burleson, from the looks of his review at amazon),
but the Greek letters are just funny-looking names of things. Some of my
friends implored me to use Latin characters instead of Greek ones, and I
considered the case carefully. But in the end, I didn't presume to start
rearranging the names of things that have been studied carefully by
several generations of scientists since the early 1800s. See p228 for
more info on this.
</personal-hypothesis>
Cary Millsap
Hotsos Enterprises, Ltd.
http://www.hotsos.com
Upcoming events:
- Performance Diagnosis 101: 10/28 Phoenix, 11/19 Sydney - SQL Optimization 101: 12/8-12 Dallas - Hotsos Symposium 2004: March 7-10 Dallas - Visit www.hotsos.com for schedule details...
-----Original Message-----
Ryan
Sent: Wednesday, October 22, 2003 11:00 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
if someone wants to dig into the type of math you are using in your book
in
more depth, what level of math expertise would you recommend? Do you
have to
go beyond college level calculus ?
----- Original Message -----
To: "Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L" <ORACLE-L_at_fatcity.com>
Sent: Wednesday, October 22, 2003 10:54 PM
> Dennis,
>
> Thanks. In fact, I feel the same way about this as many of you who
have
> written about the book in the prior two days. I think the material
that
> ended up being Part II needed to be studied, refined, and documented.
> And I believe it is important that this material be written in a BOOK
> instead of only in some electronic medium. Without Part II, I'm not
sure
> many readers would have accepted the possibility of the rather
> remarkable results I promise in Parts I and III.
>
> As it happens, Part II seems to have begun serving a number of uses,
> some of which I didn't anticipate, including:
>
> - Those who want to take our work further can do so without having to
> reinvent everything we've learned.
> - Those who want to debate our approach can argue about it on an
> unambiguous technical foundation.
> - Forcing ourselves to write everything down in a consumer-ready
format
> guided our making the Hotsos Profiler into a much more robust and
> complete product than it would have been otherwise.
> - Similarly, it tightened the content in our educational courses
> considerably. We now have excellent training material for Hotsos
> employees, and perhaps (if O'Reilly is lucky) university students of
> Oracle performance analysis around the world.
> - Funny enough, it turns out that some of the MySQL guys are at least
> considering the idea to integrate much better response time
> instrumentation into their kernel as a result of the book.
>
> But Mr. Milligan is absolutely right: you don't have to be able to
prove
> why something works in order to use it. I tried to design Parts I and
> III to give you what you need to make the method work, regardless of
> whether you are interested in proving out the theory. I just didn't
feel
> like it would be responsible to sell Part III without including Part
II.
>
>
> Cary Millsap
> Hotsos Enterprises, Ltd.
> http://www.hotsos.com
>
> Upcoming events:
> - Performance Diagnosis 101: 10/28 Phoenix, 11/19 Sydney
> - SQL Optimization 101: 12/8-12 Dallas
> - Hotsos Symposium 2004: March 7-10 Dallas
> - Visit www.hotsos.com for schedule details...
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> DENNIS WILLIAMS
> Sent: Wednesday, October 22, 2003 6:15 PM
> To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
>
> I think Cary deserves a vote of appreciation for Part II of his book.
I
> feel
> (based on the comments of others, haven't waded through it myself yet)
> that
> he has put Oracle performance tuning on a solid mathematical
foundation.
>
> My first education was engineering and I learned was that a
practice
> that rests on a solid mathematical foundation is not easily
overturned.
> A
> great example for we DBAs is relational database theory, which rests
on
> relational algebra. Fads come and go that threaten to obsolete the
> relational database, but since none of them has a solid mathematical
> foundation, they soon fade.
> If you gave me a quiz on relational algebra today, I'd probably
> flunk
> it, like many people that daily work with relational databases. But
that
> doesn't stop us from making use of the fruits of the theory.
Similarly,
> I
> don't think we need to understand Part II in detail to successfully
use
> Cary's methods to tune an Oracle database.
>
>
>
> Dennis Williams
> DBA
> Lifetouch, Inc.
> dwilliams_at_lifetouch.com <mailto:dwilliams_at_lifetouch.com>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> Sent: Wednesday, October 22, 2003 4:10 PM
> To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
>
>
>
> I also am not Cary .....
>
> I have however read Cary's book from cover to cover (including
spending
> rather too long on a romantic weekend in paris with my wife
> contemplating a
> 10046 trace parsing project :(). I Am rereading and intend to require
my
> fellow DBAs and sysadmins to read it. However to attempt to answer
your
> questions.
>
> Yes it is different from every other tuning book out there (though
there
> is
> *some* overlap with Christpher Lawson's 'the art and science of oracle
> performance tuning'). The difference is exactly in the approach - the
> central thesis of the book is (something like) that by utilizing well
> specified and targeted extended sqltrace data for problem user actions
> the
> Oracle performance analyst can quickly and efficiently resolve Oracle
> performance problems that debilitate the business performance of
Oracle
> based systems. This approach - to target problem business processes,
> find
> out why they run slowly and optimize them, is exactly what the RDBMS
> world
> needs (IMO).
>
> In addition the method Cary and Jeff describe predicts when it will
(and
> more importantly) won't be of use.
>
> Is it more readable than others? Here I do have some reservations. The
> first
> and last third of the book are extremely readable, and the character
and
> humour of the authors shines through. The formal central section will
> put
> off some (maybe a significant number) of readers though. Stephen
Hawking
> in
> 'A Brief History of Time' writes "Someone told me that each equation I
> put
> in the book would halve the sales. I therefore resolved not to have
any
> equations at all. In the end, however, I did put in one equation,
> Einstein's
> famous equation E=mc˛." Cary and Jeff have either not been given this
> advice, or ignored it in the interests of accuracy. The advantage that
> this
> gives is that the book has a formal methodology that puts others to
> shame -
> the disadvantage is that folk look at pages filled with equations full
> of
> queueing theory and Greek symbols and react badly. I hope that the
> advice is
> wrong, but fear that it may not be.
>
>
> Niall
>
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: ml-errors_at_fatcity.com [ mailto:ml-errors_at_fatcity.com
> <mailto:ml-errors_at_fatcity.com> ] On
> > Behalf Of Michael Milligan
> > Sent: 21 October 2003 17:49
> > To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
> > Subject: Your new book
> >
> >
> > Cary,
> >
> > I don't mean to ask you to brag, but can you please tell me
> > if your new book, of which I've heard good things, is
> > different in any way than other Oracle Performance Tuning
> > books out. Does it take a different approach? Does it teach
> > different methodologies? Is it more readable? I'd be very
> > interested in your own assessment. What did you try to
> > accomplish with this book?
> >
> > TIA,
> >
> > Michael Milligan
> > Oracle DBA
> > Ingenix, Inc.
> > 2525 Lake Park Blvd.
> > Salt Lake City, Utah 84120
> > wrk 801-982-3081
> > mbl 801-628-6058
> > michael.milligan_at_ingenix.com
> >
> >
> > This e-mail, including attachments, may include confidential
> > and/or proprietary information, and may be used only by the
> > person or entity to which it is addressed. If the reader of
> > this e-mail is not the intended recipient or his or her
> > authorized agent, the reader is hereby notified that any
> > dissemination, distribution or copying of this e-mail is
> > prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error, please
> > notify the sender by replying to this message and delete this
> > e-mail immediately.
> > --
> > Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net
> <http://www.orafaq.net>
> > --
> > Author: Michael Milligan
> > INET: Michael.Milligan_at_ingenix.com
> >
> > Fat City Network Services -- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.com
> <http://www.fatcity.com>
> > San Diego, California -- Mailing list and web hosting
services
> >
-- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net -- Author: Ryan INET: rgaffuri_at_cox.net Fat City Network Services -- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.com San Diego, California -- Mailing list and web hosting services --------------------------------------------------------------------- To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: ListGuru_at_fatcity.com (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net -- Author: Cary Millsap INET: cary.millsap_at_hotsos.com Fat City Network Services -- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.com San Diego, California -- Mailing list and web hosting services --------------------------------------------------------------------- To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: ListGuru_at_fatcity.com (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).Received on Thu Oct 23 2003 - 00:54:25 CDT
 |
 |