Too much theory and too much to go through.

This is good book for DBA's who are just new to RAC Technology and this book touches all aspect of configuring and installing RAC. I personally like it. It also give some knowledge about tuning the RAC databases which is somewhat different from tuning the non RAC.

I want to thanks Madhu Tuma and Mike Ault to wrote this very good book about RAC. It is the best book about RAC that i ever read.

It's help me to solve a big problem about network in my RAC enviroment.

Best regards,
Paulo Portugal.

I own all of the books on Oracle Real Application clusters which is one of the most challenging areas within Oracle database technology. What I like about this book is that it covers a broad area of technology including hardware, software and design components on how to implement a RAC cluster. The author is a known expert in the Oracle field and his brilliant insights shows in this wonderful book. In particular, I like the coverage of hardware design issues and failover with a RAC cluster. There are also nicely referenced sections on topics that one can use to lookup on Metalink. To critics of the book, I am surprised- it is not simply a rehash of metalink rather a deep coverage of the challenges with building and maintaining a RAC environment.

I found the information in this book to be quite good. There was a lot of focus on the interweaving of multiple techonologies that is required by RAC, and a significant amount of detail in each chapter. I think this book is a great start for a RAC DBA or DB and systems architects.

I found this book to be very poorly edited however, with enough grammatical mistakes to detract from my overall enjoyment of the book. I know that rampant focuses on getting books out fast, and this shows in the editing. Unfortunately, this detracts from the professionalism of the work.

Additionally, I found there to be a lot of filler material, either in the form of theoretical discussions of little relevance, extremely rudimentary concepts that should be assumed in the subject matter, or redundant material. The font was much too large, with too much whitespace per page, and too many useless and non-amusing pictures. They could have removed 300 pages from this book, which would result in a rich and smaller tome. For those of us who travel a lot or who have a large collection of books, 800 page books are a detriment unless the material warrants the size. In this case, the material did not.

Overall, I'm glad I own the book. It has proven practical in my work and gave me some great insights. But I would like to see Rampant step up a notch in editing and packaging, and provide a new edition since this field is so fast-paced.

I found the information in this book to be quite good. There was a lot of focus on the interweaving of multiple techonologies that is required by RAC, and a significant amount of detail in each chapter. I think this book is a great start for a RAC DBA or DB and systems architects.

I found this book to be very poorly edited however, with enough grammatical mistakes to detract from my overall enjoyment of the book. I know that rampant focuses on getting books out fast, and this shows in the editing. Unfortunately, this detracts from the professionalism of the work.

Additionally, I found there to be a lot of filler material, either in the form of theoretical discussions of little relevance, extremely rudimentary concepts that should be assumed in the subject matter, or redundant material. The font was much too large, with too much whitespace per page, and too many useless and non-amusing pictures. They could have removed 300 pages from this book, which would result in a rich and smaller tome. For those of us who travel a lot or who have a large collection of books, 800 page books are a detriment unless the material warrants the size. In this case, the material did not.

Overall, I'm glad I own the book. It has proven practical in my work and gave me some great insights. But I would like to see Rampant step up a notch in editing and packaging, and provide a new edition since this field is so fast-paced.

I used this book to deploy Oracle 10g RAC on Linux and UNIX. I felt that it was a good book and overall I have little ill to say about it. The examples are well written and do a good job of reinforcing what you read in the chapter. You read a little then do an example, then read some more, then add to the example and so on. You don't need any Administrative experience to use this book just a decent understanding of database design. The only criticism I could offer is that the editor should have used arrows when content is being continued on a new line for reasons of page space so that readers will know and understand (beginners can have trouble with this). It's a good book for learning Oracle 10g as a whole from the ground up and for this reason it's worth the money. It's not an overnight crash course (if that is what you are looking for).

I found that Oracle RAC is very complex and I was very happy to find the amount of technical details in this book. It guided me stepwise through a complicated RAC installation and the online scripts were most helpful to me. This is a book I recommend to all who are getting started with RAC and Grid tech.

I have worked with RAC for 2 years and this book has addressed some of the missing pieces of the puzzle. This book is first in a new series "Oracle In Focus" and will give O'Reilly a run for their money.

I really like this book and although I did have some critiques I felt that I could not resist. However, RAC is a very sophisticated Product and the authors have done a splendid job in bringing all of the material under one cover.

This book does a great job laying out the differences between RAC and OPS. It also covers the architecture and implementation of RAC for all major platforms including Veritas DBE/AC. The architecture discussion covers areas such as I/O Fencing, SCSI3 Persistent Reservations, and Quorum Disks in Chapter 3. This is important information which sets a basis for the next chapter. In Chapter 4 RAC technical Architecture is thoroughly reviewed after a brief overview of the OPS evolution.

Chapter 5 is a brief chapter that covers Hardware and RAC and explains the Implementation of RAC from a hardware perspective. I liked the approach taken by the authors because they do a good job tying in CFS or RAW with the disk subsystem.

Chapter 6 is a 100 page chapter that covers RAC Install and configuration for almost every platform. It is high level but covers the subject matter well. It is very current in relation to where Oracle is with Patch sets and such. I had only wished they covered the Linux install better and covered the watchdog/hang check timer kernel transition.

Chapter 7 is dedicated to the RAC internals and is good at condensing the internals that is covered in the Oracle RAC concepts guide. It is in Chapter 8 that the authors cover Threads but they stop short of explaining of how threads are used to generate SCN's and the role they play in recovery and Data Guard gap resolution.

Chapter 10 covers TAF (Transparent Application Failover) connectivity to RAC. Although this chapter covers the subject matter okay it is weak in when they cover load balancing on the nodes.

The remaining chapters are pretty good after skimming over them. I will update my review after finishing the book. Don't get me wrong by my critiques. I like this book very much. This book is a must for anyone who is interested in RAC.

Oracle RAC and Grid is very complicated and I have purchased every Oracle book on the subject with this one being the clear winner. The problem with Grid is that every installation is completely different and it is very hard to find a book that give operating system and disk specific configuration tips. This is a huge book and not everything will apply to you but the authors have done an excellent job in explaining how to succeed with clustered technology.

This is cledarly the best book on Oracle 10g grid and clusters. I have the others, and this is the only one that goes into enough depth to be useful and the authors have real experience using Oracle grid computing.

I also like the downloadable scripts.

This book covers grid and RAC. The grid part is mostly theoretical. Infact, I am not sure how well the Oracle in grid architecure works, as I havn't tried it.

The RAC part of book is good, though I think more coverage on moving from 9i RAC to 10g RAC would have been useful.

This book covers both 9i and 10g. Infact, some of the areas like Statspack and RAC is relevant to 9i only. Chapter on Performance monitoring and tuning is good.

In my opinion, its much better than Murali Vallath's book, which is primarily written for single instance with no more than 50 pages of information on RAC.

This book is a theory book and little more than a recapitulation of the Oracle documentation and HOWTO documents provided on metalink. There are some helpful sections on RAC performance and tuning which add some value but there is simply too much filler, including the first five chapters, that contains little more than the ABCs of Oracle and fundamental OS principles.

There are a number of exciting and provocative areas for RAC research which are occurring in SUN, HP, and LINUX laboratories, focused on scalability with topspin infiniband and scaling the cluster above 4 nodes. Some of this research is coming into view with the new TCP-H numbers. Little mention of this in the text. How to scale RAC clusters by expanding the number of interconnects is not addresses or quantitized. Use of network storage and NetApps with NFS over IP or with iSCSI is not addressed. Although it is mentioned that Oracle packages its own clusterware and file sharing tools, there is no in-depth analysis of why other tools such as SunCluster, Veritas Storage Foundation suite or RehHat clustered file system might not have superior methods for data protection, performance, or usability. None of the problem areas for installation or configuration are addressed( there are many problem areas ) beyond the simple textbook installation. No mention of the new Opteron systems using Red Hat 3, 64 bit operating systems with 64 bit versions of Oracle 10g are explored. This is an important new area which SUN, HP and other vendors are providing cost/performance effective, scalable architectures when married with infiniband.

In all fairness to Mr Ault, RAC is a complex animal with adjunct 3rd party hardware and software components which are changing all the time and keeping up with the new technologies is daunting. Still, the author adds no substantial value to those who want to go beyond simple hand-waving into implementation. This is where the the text falls down.

The book is not technical enough. It really tries to sell Oracle's new, thing, calling itself "grid" ready. Firstly, a database cannot use grid computing with any good scalability and performance. If Real Application Clusters doesnt scale well beyond 4 nodes and you DO have to partition your data to get good performance, how can one expext using even more distributed and non dedicated resources to scale? Oracle is known for using these marketing "approaches". Providing some unified view of enterprise resources is a good thing however it is not grid computing. My critisizim of the book is that it contains a lot of stuff that is just that, a repetition of marketing litrature. It is not critical enough and could have been more technical. The book is good for a marketing or business person. And what is up with the dedication "glory of my god" ?

I've worked with RAC (9i and 10g) for quite some time, yet I still founds lots of great stuff in this book. It combines background information about grid and utility computing along with real examples to help you install, configure and tune Oracle 10g RAC.

People new to RAC should definitely check out the chapters on architecture and migration topics.

This book is a must for anyone using, or thinking of using, Oracle 10g RAC.

This book is great, it gives real step by step examples for installing and configuring Oracle Grid.

This book is a must.

As the editor I was privileged to see the authors develop the content for this book and I was very happy to finally see a comprehensive book on Oracle10g Grid technology.

Oracle promotes Grid as cutting-edge, and this book makes it very clear how powerful, sophisticated (and complex) Grid is to install and configure.

The book has complete instructions for installing and configuring Oracle Grid and exceptional descriptions of the Enterprise Manager Grid control features.

Finally, a real-deal Oracle10g Grid book.