The book cover a wide range of issues related to performance tuning. It helps me better understand the magic behind oracle PT. The author is an expert in the area and used his expertise to design a PT tuning guide. I would definitely recommend this book to junior and senior dbas. I am looking forward to the upcoming 10g version that is set to be released sometimes next year.

The authors have really put in alot of effort in making sure that the Oracle database can be understood in every aspect, and this really makes tuning easier :) Surely, this is one of the best books around.

cheers!

Good approach about performances and analysis.
I regret this book does not include Oracle 10g.

I devoured this book over the weekend after a good DBA friend of mine recommend it to me. Also a very senior Oracle DBA consultant who interviewed me a year ago suggested that I study it to get senior DBA job. Overall an excellent text- clearly written packed with tons of very useful tuning information and of course the cute photo of Mr. Larry Ellison when he was 22 years old and looked like a pencil geek rather than the gazillionaire today. My only beef- NO CD-ROM or link to ANY of the scripts or tables for the book! This is frustrating guys because when I try to follow along with the tuning examples in the book I cannot duplicate same results to see how the tuning is performed. Other than that gripe a highly recommend it to Oracle DBAs. I also like the sections on X$ tables- few places actually discuss this and its nice to know how the X$ tables interact with Oracle kernel and Operating system.

Best chapters to me were Chapters 6-9 on using native Oracle trace and tuning tools like tkprof, sql trace and stored outlines. Chapter on index tuning and tuning SQL queries and joins really my favorites as few places discuss this. AND just be advised all you DBAs- managers and senior Oracle guys will tech you out on very very difficult tuning questions so study and review this book before and after interviews to land job! Along with Guy Harrisons SQL tuning book and Richmond Shee's tuning book on Oracle Wait interface the best three tuning books ever written for hungry DBAs. When users scream and yell that they cannot run a report these will save your job.

I bought this book a couple of months ago, and am absolutely DELIGHTED with it!

I was a bit wary of buying it, based upon other reviews; having now read it (several times), I cannot understand why anyone would trash this excellent work.

The author has, to my mind, produced a proper, proper tuning guide, suitable for beginner and pro, alike.

This book is easy to read (although the mathematics in Chapter 9 is way beyond the level of the rest of the book!), the ideas in it are well-explained (including caveats, where appropriate), and is an excellent source of tuning insights and approaches.

The author is obviously highly knowledgeable of Oracle. He is, after all, an Oracle Certified Master, which is the highest level of Oracle certification requiring two days of intensive lab testing. Most people fail to pass.

Overall the book is very well written and is full of useful knowledge. I found its chapters on indexes, Oracle Enterprise Manager, and X$ tables as among the best. I found its chapters on query tuning to be poor, failing to even mention transaction isolation levels and different locking.

This is not a book for beginners, but for experienced Oracle DBAs who wants to get a better handle on improving Oracle performance.

The downside of this book is that it is somewhat sloppily written and put together, almost as if the book was written as a midnight term paper. The information is valuable and of high quality, just that its level or organization and writing could have used 2 more months of refinement and rewriting.

I picked up this book to review the world of Oracle tuning and I found it contained lots of useful information. Good examples of tuning Oracle on Solaris. Many similarities of tuning points between Oracle and DB2. I particularly liked Chapter 9 on optimization queries and workloads.

This is one of the best Oracle tuning book and packed with great information.

I like two things in this book, first is an old photo of the "Larry the Geek" at the beginning of the book ;-) and second, a well balanced coverage of all the different tuning pieces of the mosaic known as Oracle tuning.

This book is a classic Oracle tuning book in a sense that Rich doesn't hesitate to write about ALL the important tuning pieces. Yes, he even recommend "proactive" monitoring of instance efficiency with various hit ratios as opposed to today popular mantra of focusing solely on wait event interface (reactive tuning, according to Niemiec). In my opinion the correct approach is really somewhere in between (the fact is that monitoring hit ratios alone actually doesn't guarantee proactive approach in all cases - your instance can crawl, while at the same time hit ratios are all green), this is why I appreciate author approach, he recognizes that many DBAs nowadays doesn't care much about hit ratios and instead focus completely on wait event interface but at the same time he points out that hit ratios should not be carelessly overlooked.

However, no matter how complete this book appears to be, you should not rely solely on information from it, nor believe everything you read (for example, the definition of paging on page 648: "....paging occurs when users not currently active are moved from memory to disk....", yeah right :-)
I would recommend that you combine information from this book with some other good resources, like the "Oracle Performance Tuning 101" (even if it's a little bit outdated) or a recent book from Thomas Kyte.

One final question to the Rich (if you're reading this review); "No offence, but what have you thinking about, when you included spool of the results from some queries in appendixes B and C (over 120 pages!) ? What's next, spool of select * from dba_objects? Total waste of paper! Please, don't do that in the next edition, think about all those saved trees (hmm... perhaps a little forest!), and let us spool the results for ourselves, after all, we all have access to SQL*Plus ;-).

Niemiec is a genius. Say no more.

This book is a work of art! It's clear that considerable time and energy went into the research demonstrated in this book. It's amazing how many tips Rich shows off too. If you need a fast application, this book is an absolute MUST HAVE for your library. Take the time to read and understand every word written - it is SO well thought out. Rich is a genuine, caring and devoted person to the betterment of IT and fellow mankind! Great work and thank you for this work of art! This is clearly the best performance tuning book that I've ever seen!

I have read previous book by Rich and found this one is not as good as the previous one.
As in previous book, there are too much of redundant information. For the experienced
database engineer this book is somewhat helpful, but do not expect an exciting reading.
Some of the chapters like init.ora parameters or v$ views are not really useful. In my opinion
about 400 pages would have been more than enough to cover performance tuning.
In the same time there are useful chapters that are interesting for even experienced DBA, such
us table joins and statspack. There are not enough information for 9i specific tuning tips on
automatic undo management and automatic PGA allocation