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Motivation: New Book on Oracle 10g is Timeley Arrival
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Oracle Essentials by Rick Greenwald et al, O'Reilly Press -
373 page $39
Oracle Essentials is one of those delightful books that can be recommended
to a broad range of readers. Top Management will appreciate the overviews
and can dive in without trepidation on specific topics. Developers will
appreciate the thorough yet approachable discussion of all the ... well
Oracle Essentials. And DBAs will love it because they can give it to the
other 2 parties.
This book arrives at a timely juncture - when Oracle's newest version
of its database gets off to a fairly smooth start while one of its major
rivals,
Microsoft SQL Server, suffers another 8-12 month delay in delivery. Oracle
has taken advantage of this and is offer a 25 user license on DELL Server
under Linux for $3700 versus $5100 for a 25user SQL Server license on Windows.
Also
from a technical standpoint, Oracle 10g completes a suite of parallel processing,
clustering and management of DBMS capabilities that are very compelling.
Unfortunately, technical documentation direct from Oracle can be
too detailed. So readers looking for a balanced
yet comprehensive intro to Oracle 10g have to dig into the Oracle tech pubs
and/or wander the net
links piecing together a story on the state of the Oracle art. |
However, Oracle Essentials provides a dispassionate and thorough executive
summary of Oracle 10g database. This book is pitched above the details of
SQL syntax and PL/SQL coding but right at the level of Oracle design, architecture
and maangement that will be of interest to DBAs, project managers and CIOs.
But developers should not shy away - because there is a strong overview of
how Oracle is structured with ample details of indexing, query optimization
strategies,
object
and spatial datatype support. As well the book does not stint on describing
operations and management support - replication, warehousing, conflict reolution,
journaling
and backup/recovery, tuning and process management
support. The coverage is thorough and makes the distinction between features
available on say 9i and 10g but not available on 8i versions. Also notable
changes in syntax or retired features (such as the rules-based optimizer
in
10g) are highlighted.
The other feature which stands out in this book is the judicious use
of diagrams and drawings to illustrate the shape of relations between tables,
disks, client and server participants in a database world. In addition
there is the usual O'Reilly features such as indented tips and traps that
help to highlight key points along the way. But most notable, this book
passed the "what to read next" test - Harry Potter and Stephen Pinker took
second
fiddle
to
Oracle Essentials.
by Jacques Surveyer, April 13,2004
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