Great book for Oracle database professionals who want to deepen their understanding of the manifold factors that affect performance. I learned a ton of instantly useful information during my first pass through the book. I now keep this book within arm's reach as a reference, using it frequently to address tuning issues as they arise.

In my opinion, this is the best Oracle press I've ever read in its quality. The book is well organized, has extensive tested examples and the author's strong experience apparantly added to the value of the book.
For those who want to be specialized in Oracle database tuning, this book is a must.
I wish all Oracle books would be in this level of quality.

Hi,

This book is great for DBA and Developper alike. I would recommend it to anyone working with Oracle, even if you're not working to solve performance issues. With all those tips at hand never your application will suffer from poor programming.

Guillaume

I highly recommend this book as a handy reference to keep at your desk. It is full of handy tips and a great assessment for reviewing your own environnment.

I love reading this book. I typically read a few pages before bed. It's filled with lots of practical examples and suggestions. Very thorough explanations. Some of the examples could do with a little more explaining but overall it's still very useful.

This book manages all concepts, basical and advanced, and the reader can review and fortify concepts. The OCM Author with explains in an easy mode Oracle Products. Excellent book.

A "must have" Oracle book for anyone who works with Oracle on a day-to-day basis. The database efficiencies I have been able to obtain for my clients by simply using Rich's book as a point of reference are well worth the cost in purchasing it.

Adam Suber, Event Chairperson, Southeastern Michigan Oracle Professionals (SEMOP) Group.

Excellent copy - not a single mark in it.
Arrived on time as promised -
folks, keep up the good work.

This book contains a wealth of knowledge. Very helpful for the novice and experienced DBA or developer.

There are lots of mistakes in this book , one exemple p704
"Oracle Database 10g uses a scheduled job, GATHER_STATS_JOB, to collect AWR statistics."
It 's completly false...
With these huge error,i don't think it could be a a good book , couldn't it ?.

A really great book for those who want an in-depth knowledge of Perf Tuning. The instructions are easy to follow yet very effective to tne the DB. I really liked the chapter on using hints and SQL tuning. I will definitely recommend this book to everyone.

If you know Rick Niemiec, you know that he loves what he does. You can see it in his presentations, you can see it when working with him (as I've had the honor of so doing), and you can see it in this book. This book is clearly a labor of love for Rich, and it is a eminently usable book.

In each chapter there is something for everyone, the new DBA, the forgetful DBA (thats me), the five hatted DBA, and even the advanced DBA. From the wonderful first chapter full of Oracle history and lore, to the deeper technical dives beyond, the book is a reference for the seasoned, and a text for those who are learning. It's well worth anyones time to read and absorb.

Each quarter, my team of DBA's has a book assigned to read. We then review that book in our twice monthly team meetings. In the next Quarter (Q4) we will be taking on Rich's book. Because of the size and comprehensive nature, we may well take it into Q108.

Thanks Rich, for an outstanding effort!

If you know Rick Niemiec, you know that he loves what he does. You can see it in his presentations, you can see it when working with him (as I've had the honor of so doing), and you can see it in this book. This book is clearly a labor of love for Rich, and it is a eminently usable book.

In each chapter there is something for everyone, the new DBA, the forgetful DBA (thats me), the five hatted DBA, and even the advanced DBA. From the wonderful first chapter full of Oracle history and lore, to the deeper technical dives beyond, the book is a reference for the seasoned, and a text for those who are learning. It's well worth anyones time to read and absorb.

Each quarter, my team of DBA's has a book assigned to read. We then review that book in our twice monthly team meetings. In the next Quarter (Q4) we will be taking on Rich's book. Because of the size and comprehensive nature, we may well take it into Q108.

Thanks Rich, for an outstanding effort!

If you want to be a master in Oracle performance tuning, this book
is a must. The author offers a comprehensive treatment of topics such as:
indexes, hints, explain plan, joins, STATSPACK etc.
A key point in the book is that it is written to two kind of people:
developer and DBA. In both cases you are going to master Oracle
performance tuning! It is simply great!

If you are a Oracle DBA running Oracle 10g then you need this book. The sooner you get this book the better. This book provides the tools and the knowledge to approach Oracle 10g tuning. Often performance tuning book provide the "Here is how to find/identify the problem" and stopping at that point. This book goes one step further and identifies solutions and insight on how to handle the performance problem

The book starts out covering basics (index basics, I/O basics & query tuning basics) and gets progressively meatier as the chapters go on and eventually into v$ views and x$ tables chapters. The best chapters are Chapter 5 (nice screen shots of Enterprise Manager), Chapter 10 on PL/SQL, Chapter 12 & 13 on V$ views and X$ tables, Chapter 14 on AWR Report and Chapter 16 on UNIX/Linux commands. It will take a beginner DBA up a notch, an intermediate DBA up a couple notches.


Chapter 1 - New features including brief introductions (later chapters cover in-depth topics) on ASM, AWR, ADDM, ASMM, Flash Recovery, Bigfile Tablespaces, CRS, Data Pump and Grid Control Basics. A nice overview including a New Background Processes and Version Comparison/Feature chart at the end.

Chapter 2 - Basics on indexes including B-Tree, function-based, bitmapped indexes, reversed key indexes, index ordered tables, hashing, histograms and statistics.

Chapter 3 - Detailed information on ASM (Automatic Storage Manager) and Disk I/O. It also includes RAID basics and big tablespaces.

Chapter 4 - Focuses on the key init.ora parameters (detailed information in Appendix A as well on init.ora documented parameters). It includes detailed information on the buffer cache and shared pool with many queries for each (includes the new SGA_TARGET as well). Includes information on the PGA as well and a Top 25 parameter list. There is an undocumented parameter list in appendix A and a sample server parameter list at the end of the chapter as well as Oracle E-Business recommended parameters.

Chapter 5 - A great chapter for grid control with over 70 screen shots, many which are multiple node grid control screen shots. Many sections on monitoring, tuning for the database, host, application server and ASM. Also shows running ASH and AWR from Enterprise managers. Show primarily the basics on each of these.

Chapter 6 - Detailed chapter on Explain Plan, DBMS_XPLAN and Stored Outline with detailed examples of each. Shows how to run and read Autotrace as well. Shows the new DBMS_MONITOR & TRCSESS. It also shows how to trace things doing an Alter Session set event.

Chapter 7 - A chapter on basic hint usage including INDEX, FULL, ORDERED, LEADING, NO_INDEX, NO_EXPAND, CURSOR_SHARING, USE_NL and many others.

Chapter 8 - A query tuning basics chapter. Mostly for beginners, it includes sections on how to find bad queries, use hints, change how queries run...etc.

Chapter 9 - A more in-depth query tuning chapter that includes more complex query tuning with multiple table joining suggestions and bitmap join indexes. Covers some advanced topics on mathematical modeling of queries and object oriented comparisons, but only a bit of info on these.

Chapter 10 - Another great chapter, especially for us DBA's that are a bit light on PL/SQL. Some great PL/SQL tips and tuning for things like tracking queries, reducing per iteration time, reducing calls to SYSDATE, pinning things in the Shared Pool as well as finding invalid or large objects, tips for using DATE, using Pipelined table functions, and a final section on writing PL/SQL for the beginner.

Chapter 11 - Covers RAC and Parallel operations. The RAC section is an overview primarily (points you to others books for RAC in-depth), but it does cover tuning RAC as far as some of the primary issues you might have and main RAC waits and how to solve them. There is also a parallel query section in this chapter that shows some issues with Parallel as well as some of the hints and initialization parameters to set up for parallel.

Chapter 12 - A great chapter with a massive amount of V$ view queries - great one!

Chapter 13 - Another very good chapter with a lot of queries going to the X$ tables, a better section on setting events, tracing and debugging. A great section on groupings of x$ tables and an even better section at the very end of the chapter on what each of the names mean (like x$bh = buffer hash).

Chapter 14 - Best chapter for hands on tuning using the new AWR report and also a section on what's new in 10gR2 for statspack (still free) and how to use it. Great waits section and how to fix each - well worth reading this one in detail!

Chapter 15 - A pretty basic overall review of a system including a ranking. Only for the beginners.

Chapter 16 - A very nice UNIX/Linux chapter with a lot of things covered including sar, iostat, vmstat, mpstat, ps, ipcs and some other nice ones. DBA's best utilities.

Appendixes - A is an initialization parameter list (and Top undocumented list), Appendix B & C are V$ and X$ listings.