Oracle DBA 101

Oracle DBA 101 offers a friendly place for budding Oracle professionals to learn critical database management skills. Refreshingly, the book's entertaining style doesn't preclude the authors from discussing advanced concepts.

The text opens with a discussion of everything an Oracle DBA is expected to do. It moves quickly into the particulars of the Oracle architecture, all the while maintaining a comfortable writing style that makes easy reading of material that is, because of its technical nature, very dry. It also includes excellent discussions of the valuable inner workings of Oracle such as the V$ views and tools such as the Optimizer and Explain Plan. This section, along with a later chapter on performance, provides techniques for diagnosing the causes of even mysterious performance symptoms. A chapter on backup and recovery is included, but it is fairly brief.

Oracle is a very complex product, and this book doesn't attempt to make a seasoned pro out of the reader. But it does provide a fine balance of big picture perspective and internal details to enable new DBAs to hit the ground running. --Stephen W. Plain

Topics covered: Database layout, installation and configuration, tablespaces, System Global Area, monitoring, DBA and V$ views, SQL*Plus overview, Optimizer, Explain Plan, TKPROF, Autotrace, performance tuning, backup and recovery.

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