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Re: Books to suggest

From: Niall Litchfield <niall.litchfield_at_gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 31 Aug 2004 14:13:51 +0100
Message-ID: <7765c897040831061369dd0d2c@mail.gmail.com>


On Tue, 31 Aug 2004 05:33:19 -0700 (PDT), Rachel Carmichael <wisernet100_at_yahoo.com> wrote:
> What? You mean to tell me you haven't bought a copy so I could get that
> $0.0001 in royalties?

Absolutely not - its written in American after all and I don't do foreign languages....

> Seriously, we did try to make DBA 101 as basic as we could. And in
> general, we tried to make it version UNspecific. We did note where
> things were different between versions. Based on comments from readers
> of the first version, we did about a 60% rewrite of the 9i version --
> not to include the "cool" 9i stuff but to make concepts clearer. It's
> hard to include all the new stuff, while keeping the important old
> stuff, when you don't get an increased page count.

I do think that versions are important for some types of book, and DBA 101 would be exactly one of those. I'm not for example a great fan of the 'self-managing database' tag line from our favourite software supplier, but management tasks for 10g are significantly different than those for 6.0.36 (where I started). Actually they are probably quite changed from 8i as well.

Performance management is far less changed - do as little as possible as infrequently as possible would be a good adage here. - by version numbers. The same applies to good development practice and good design.

> Publishers feel, rightly or wrongly, however that the buying public
> wants the latest version number on the cover of the book.... So
> Jonathan's book, version unspecific that it is, loses because of that
> silly "8i" on the cover.

I suspect that publishers are correct - anyone here interested in a 7.3.4 book? Mogens obviously needs to write a v5 book but I suspect self-publishing is the way to go for that one. I also have some sympathy. If I ask in an online forum "how do I avoid fragmentation?" I'll get a bunch of response saying it isn't an issue if I'll only run with ULMTs, a bunch of responses asking why I think I have a fragmentation problem and a bunch of responses asking me to state the Oracle version *because it is relevant to my question*. All of these are sensible responses for a specific question - they also ought to be relevant for a book.

I also agree with Jonathan's statement in his preface as an approach to Oracle Management, but still think the book is, to a lesser degree than most but still not insignificantly, version dependent (meaning not it is irrelevant for 9i/10g but that it is of less use for v8.0 and below).

-- 
Niall Litchfield
Oracle DBA
http://www.niall.litchfield.dial.pipex.com
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Received on Tue Aug 31 2004 - 08:09:53 CDT

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