Oracle SAP Administration (O'Reilly Oracle)

Tailored to the needs of people who know Oracle, SAP R/3, or a little of both, Oracle SAP Administration explains the conventions and utilities that integrate these software tools before getting into optimization techniques and strategies for achieving increased data safety. Appropriately, author Donald Burleson emphasizes optimization of disk-access operations. He relates two methods for identifying I/O hotspots--specifically, he shows how to examine the Oracle file statistics and how to use Unix's iostat utility to get a picture of what's going on. He then describes strategies for restructuring tablespaces to minimize holdups. He also discusses RAID implementations, their performance penalties, and the increased level of reliability they provide.

Beyond file system considerations, Oracle SAP Administration describes how to reorganize tables, tablespaces, and indexes to achieve top performance. You'll find explicit listings of SQL statements and Korn shell scripts that restructure databases, plus a wealth of diagrams that illustrate how inefficient databases differ from optimized ones (a concept that's not always easy to communicate in text). The author tackles Oracle's parallel-processing solutions and explains how they (particularly the ones that came before Oracle8) interact with SAP. A quick discussion of how very large Oracle/SAP databases behave rounds out this coverage of a robust enterprise duo. --David Wall

Topics covered: Naming conventions, SAPDBA, SAPGUI, optimizing file access, reorganizing Oracle objects for better performance, administration tasks and utilities, and Oracle Parallel Server (OPS) as it applies to SAP. Burleson uses SAP R/3 and Oracle versions 7 and 8 in his documentation.