Re: RE: Useful Oracle books

On 05/28/2004 09:47:33 AM, Charu Joshi wrote:
>
> I purchased Harrison's book about 3 months before I heard of Dan
> Tow's book. Now I am a bit afraid that I might get wrong/outdated
> facts. Can anybody tell what parts of the book are still relevant
> and what parts are best avoided? Or should I throw it away and go
> for Dan's book?

Throw away Guy Harrison's book? Haven't you seen Fahrenheit 451 (not to be confused with the Fahrenheit 911)? Both books are good and it's hard to tell which one is better, because they're written using different perspective. Dan's book basically tells you how to tune any join and doesn't venture too deep in oracle specifics. The point at which the two books are closest is when Dan explains how to turn a non-correlated subquery into a correlated one, to delay execution of the subquery. Dan is using graph theory to develop something that can be considered a mathematical theory of tuning joins (nodes with attributes, uni-directional graphs and similar stuff), while Guy Harrison gets down with an arsenal of oracle specific things and practices. Harrison's book is a bit long-toothed now because it was written for Oracle 8i and not Oracle 10g, but it is still relevant. It also discusses how to organize tablespaces, using direct I/O, raw devices and alike. Dan didn't delve into those details, he confined his research on the SQL level and did a comparative study of Oracle, DB2 and the database whose name I will not utter here. Both books are very good, Dan's is a little bit newer, but both books are worth reading. If I were you, I'd start with Guy Harrison's work to give you broad details about Oracle and then venture into Dan's book and see it form the mathematical side. You may also want to throw "Optimizing Oracle Performance" by C. Millsap ("C" standing for "Cary", not for "Carry" or "Carrie". Unce upon a time, there was a lady named Carry Nation, and I'm not sure that Mogens or me would get along with her. She was the foremost crusader against some mighty fine beverages and has contributed signficantly to the constitutonal amendment that is known as "prohibition") which gives you yet another perspective on tuning. Don't feed that book to the flames, either. It's SQL tuning from yet another perspective.

-- 
Mladen Gogala
Oracle DBA



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