Re: Oracle vs O'Reilly Performance Tuning Books

charlesm1_at_rocketmail.com writes:
| Does anyone have any views/comments on Oracle's Oracle Performance
| Tuning book compared to O'Reilly's book?

funny you ask. i bought both when i started fiddling with oracle 8.0 and 8.1 a couple of weeks ago. (i've worked with other databases for a while.)

for starters, the 2nd ed. of gurry & corrigan came out in 1996 and only covers oracle 7. a lot of stuff seems to have happened since then. i found the density of specific, useful, "hey, that wasn't in the #$@! oracle documentation" tips to be fairly low. that may be because the oracle documentation has improved dramatically. (certainly there's more and more of it with each release...)

the niemiec book is written in that fairly annoying way that publishers probably think of as "friendly" or "conversational." there's a significant degree of redundancy (tips duplicated in several chapters, multiple levels of summarization, etc.). there are also plenty of those "laundry lists" that always fill the appendices of such books. it's aimed at oracle 8 but manages to leave in some obsolete oracle 7 stuff (i.e., it doesn't always manage to flag things that no longer work). it's not always internally consistent (in two places it tells you to set LOG_CHECKPOINT_INTERVAL to 0 and in the appendix it tells you not to do so - as does the oracle 8 documentation).

THAT SAID: the niemiec book also tells you a bunch of stuff that you DON'T get from the oracle documentation and directly contradicts some of the "tips" in the sample files (like the example init.ora, which is just plain evil incarnate) and documentation. i found it useful - i'd look at what oracle was telling me and say, "hey, that doesn't make any sense," and then find in the niemiec book that it probably doesn't.

it's not an acceptable substitute for reading the tuning guide and admin guide but i found it to be a useful supplement. YMMV. --

  Paul M. Aoki         | Computer Science Division, EECS #1776
  aoki_at_CS.Berkeley.EDU | University of California
                       | Berkeley, CA 94720-1776 USA