Product Description

Announcing a new book from Apress and the OakTable Network:

Oracle Insights: Tales of the Oak Table presents eleven world-renowned industry specialists proffering their own highly experienced views, input, and insights on Oracle&emdash;where it's been, where it's going, how (and how not) to use it successfully, the software and techniques that they've introduced to help people achieve their goals, and some frightening tales of what can happen when fundamental design principles are ignored.

The collaborating authors have solved many of the worst Oracle performance problems in the world, and they've each saved at least one doomed flagship project. Over many years they've been sharing their unique knowledge with each other at conferences, around the OakTable, and in coffee shops, restaurants, and bars on five continents. Now they want to share their key insights with you.

A major focus of this book concerns the ways in which you can avoid common and debilitating mistakes when building Oracle software projects. From these stories, you'll learn the simple steps that will help you avoid real pain on your next (or current) Oracle project.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #711669 in Books
• Published on: 2004-07-23
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 456 pages

From the Publisher
Announcing a new book from Apress and the OakTable Network: Read unique insights into how to develop successful Oracle applications

About the Author
Dave Ensor spent over 35 years in IT, almost all of it in a hands-on role as a programmer, a designer, or a researcher into the performance characteristics of specific pieces of software. He worked with Oracle databases for 15 years in all three of these roles, also building a worldwide reputation for his ability to present technical material with clarity and humor. He is coauthor of the books Oracle Design and Oracle8 Design Tips, and he’s an Honorary Oracle9i Certified Master. Dave holds undergraduate degrees in both mathematics and law.

Tim Gorman began his IT career in 1984 as a C programmer on UNIX and VMS systems, working on medical and financial systems as an application developer, systems programmer, and systems administrator. He joined Oracle Corporation in 1990 as a consultant, then became an independent consultant in 1998, and has worked for SageLogix since 2000. Gorman is the coauthor of Essential Oracle8i Data Warehousing and Oracle8 Data Warehousing. He specializes in performance tuning applications, databases, and systems, as well as data warehouse design and implementation, backup and recovery, architecture and infrastructure, and database administration. Gorman still considers himself a pretty good coder, although the market for C programs has dried up somewhat lately.

Anjo Kolk worked for over 16 years at Oracle and now runs Oraperf.com.Jonathan Lewis has been involved in database work for more than 19 years, specializing in Oracle for the last 16 years and working as a consultant for the last 12 years. Jonathan is currently a director of the UK Oracle User Group (UKOUG) and is well known for his many presentations at the UKOUG conferences and SIGs. He is also renowned for his tutorials and seminars about the Oracle database engine, which he has held in various countries around the world.

Jonathan authored the acclaimed book Practical Oracle 8i (Addison-Wesley, 2001), and he writes regularly for the UKOUG magazine and occasionally for other publications, including OTN and DBAZine.

Connor McDonald has worked with Oracle since the early 1990s, cutting his teeth on Oracle versions 6.0.36 and 7.0.12. Over the past 11 years, Connor has worked with systems in Australia, the UK, Southeast Asia, Western Europe, and the United States. He has come to realize that although the systems and methodologies around the world are very diverse, there tends to be two common themes in the development of systems running on Oracle: either to steer away from the Oracle-specific functions or to use them in a haphazard or less-than-optimal fashion.Hotsos provides performance-improvement tools for Oracle environments and also delivers training in the form of clinics and the very successful Hotsos symposiums.

With 15 years' experience in professional computing, James Morle has been personally responsible for the architecture and implementation of some of the world’s largest and most complex business systems, including a 3-node Oracle Parallel Server configuration that services 3000 online users. James is a well-respected member of the Oracle community and is the author of the critically acclaimed book Scaling Oracle8i.He is a renowned speaker at Oracle conferences all over the world and organizes some highly respected events through Miracle A/S, including the annual MasterClass (2001: Cary Millsap, 2002: Jonathan Lewis, 2003: Steve Adams, 2004: Tom Kyte) and the Miracle Database Forum, which is a 3-day conference for database people. He is also the cofounder of the Danish Oracle User Group (OUGKD) and was voted "Educator of the Year" in Oracle Magazine’s Editor’s Choice Awards, 2003.

Gaja has more than 12 years of technical expertise, with over 11 years of industry experience working with Oracle systems. His key areas of interest include performance architectures, scalable storage solutions, highly available systems, and system performance management for data warehouses and transactional systems. He holds a master’s degree in computer science from Bowling Green State University, Ohio. He has presented many papers at various regional, national, and international Oracle conferences, and is the coauthor of Oracle Performance Tuning 101 from Oracle Press.

Customer Reviews

A niche book for Oracle internals experts
This book is intended for Oracle internals experts who want a deep, deep drill down into the guts of Oracle to look for optimizations. It's well written and very in-depth, but you should have a look at the table of contents to make sure that you can get anything out of this book before you buy it. If you aren't the target audience then you are likely to get little or nothing out of it.

I want more books like this one!
I really don't know where I should begin writing this review to give the book a proper credit that it deserves. Hmm...FUN - I think that this word best describes this collection of essays (eleven prominent authors instead of more usual one or two, certainly helped a lot).
Can't remember when was the last time that I read technical book that kept me reading and reading, and reading - simply because all essays were *fun* to read. To be clear, yes I'm an Oracle geek, but I don't think you have to be an expert to understand 'the point' in the majority of the book, on contrary, if you're by any chance an Oracle newbie you have an opportunity to learn from the true experts (from their work done on the "projects from hell") and pick up some good habits and techniques to start your Oracle career (this book is not really about internals as much as it's about proper design and importance of understanding technology before using it - and using it to the full extent - you'll probably never again write DB agnostic applications, if this was your sin in the past :-).
So, being an expert or not, I'm sure you'll get the true 'message' from this book that will stick with you for the rest of your life (of course experts will enjoy reading it slightly more, they'll finally learn, what AFIEDT.BUF is really all about ;-).
Finally, thank you guys for writing this book, and Mr. Mogens Noorgard (you lucky *****), thank you for "networking" Oak Table members together.
Thank you for reading this review.

A Painful, Funny Journey
I have 14 years of Oracle Experience with some of the busiest and largest transaction systems in the world. This book really hit home for me and brought back a lot of memories of painful times as well as gave me new insights. I have re-read this book twice since getting it amonth ago. It is that good.

The Tales of the Oaktable is a skeptic's work of technological history that is funny and hard to put down, but which also provides experienced database professionals roadmaps to solve their pressing problems ( or even see that they have a problem.)

The authors take an empirical, rational approach to diagnosing and discovering the most serious problems while providing amusing revelations about the people and organizations they have worked with. Along the way they lift Oracle's skirts and take us out back to show us the dirty laundry and other junk in Oracle's back yard. They provide methods to diagnose and reapir problems in oracle performance as well as enumerate the known pitfalls in project management and database design. Seasoned IT types will groan and laugh during these chapters.

They also look at larger architectural, economic, psychological, and philosophical issues which have a direct impact on databases and large information systems. Norgaard's history of computing is quite depressing. And I agree that many of the "new" blood wants to focus on .NET and J2EE - when the real heart and soul is still the data.

Oracle Insights DOES require both deep thought and deep, hard-won knowledge of Oracle in order to fully enjoy it. So, if at first you don't like it, then you don't know what you don't know.