I think Cary deserves a vote of appreciation for Part II of his book. I feel
(based on the comments of others, haven't waded through it myself yet) that
he has put Oracle performance tuning on a solid mathematical foundation.
My first education was engineering and I learned was that a practice
that rests on a solid mathematical foundation is not easily overturned. A
great example for we DBAs is relational database theory, which rests on
relational algebra. Fads come and go that threaten to obsolete the
relational database, but since none of them has a solid mathematical
foundation, they soon fade.
If you gave me a quiz on relational algebra today, I'd probably flunk
it, like many people that daily work with relational databases. But that
doesn't stop us from making use of the fruits of the theory. Similarly, I
don't think we need to understand Part II in detail to successfully use
Cary's methods to tune an Oracle database.
Dennis Williams
DBA
Lifetouch, Inc.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
-----Original Message-----
Sent: Wednesday, October 22, 2003 4:10 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
I also am not Cary .....
I have however read Cary's book from cover to cover (including spending
rather too long on a romantic weekend in paris with my wife contemplating a
10046 trace parsing project :(). I Am rereading and intend to require my
fellow DBAs and sysadmins to read it. However to attempt to answer your
questions.
Yes it is different from every other tuning book out there (though there is
*some* overlap with Christpher Lawson's 'the art and science of oracle
performance tuning'). The difference is exactly in the approach - the
central thesis of the book is (something like) that by utilizing well
specified and targeted extended sqltrace data for problem user actions the
Oracle performance analyst can quickly and efficiently resolve Oracle
performance problems that debilitate the business performance of Oracle
based systems. This approach - to target problem business processes, find
out why they run slowly and optimize them, is exactly what the RDBMS world
needs (IMO).
In addition the method Cary and Jeff describe predicts when it will (and
more importantly) won't be of use.
Is it more readable than others? Here I do have some reservations. The first
and last third of the book are extremely readable, and the character and
humour of the authors shines through. The formal central section will put
off some (maybe a significant number) of readers though. Stephen Hawking in
'A Brief History of Time' writes "Someone told me that each equation I put
in the book would halve the sales. I therefore resolved not to have any
equations at all. In the end, however, I did put in one equation, Einstein's
famous equation E=mc�." Cary and Jeff have either not been given this
advice, or ignored it in the interests of accuracy. The advantage that this
gives is that the book has a formal methodology that puts others to shame -
the disadvantage is that folk look at pages filled with equations full of
queueing theory and Greek symbols and react badly. I hope that the advice is
wrong, but fear that it may not be.
Niall
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [ mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ] On
> Behalf Of Michael Milligan
> Sent: 21 October 2003 17:49
> To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
> Subject: Your new book
>
>
> Cary,
>
> I don't mean to ask you to brag, but can you please tell me
> if your new book, of which I've heard good things, is
> different in any way than other Oracle Performance Tuning
> books out. Does it take a different approach? Does it teach
> different methodologies? Is it more readable? I'd be very
> interested in your own assessment. What did you try to
> accomplish with this book?
>
> TIA,
>
> Michael Milligan
> Oracle DBA
> Ingenix, Inc.
> 2525 Lake Park Blvd.
> Salt Lake City, Utah 84120
> wrk 801-982-3081
> mbl 801-628-6058
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>
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