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Home -> Community -> Mailing Lists -> Oracle-L -> RE: Your new book
Dennis,
Thanks. In fact, I feel the same way about this as many of you who have written about the book in the prior two days. I think the material that ended up being Part II needed to be studied, refined, and documented. And I believe it is important that this material be written in a BOOK instead of only in some electronic medium. Without Part II, I'm not sure many readers would have accepted the possibility of the rather remarkable results I promise in Parts I and III.
As it happens, Part II seems to have begun serving a number of uses, some of which I didn't anticipate, including:
But Mr. Milligan is absolutely right: you don't have to be able to prove why something works in order to use it. I tried to design Parts I and III to give you what you need to make the method work, regardless of whether you are interested in proving out the theory. I just didn't feel like it would be responsible to sell Part III without including Part II.
Cary Millsap
Hotsos Enterprises, Ltd.
http://www.hotsos.com
Upcoming events:
- Performance Diagnosis 101: 10/28 Phoenix, 11/19 Sydney - SQL Optimization 101: 12/8-12 Dallas - Hotsos Symposium 2004: March 7-10 Dallas - Visit www.hotsos.com for schedule details...
-----Original Message-----
DENNIS WILLIAMS
Sent: Wednesday, October 22, 2003 6:15 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
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.
dwilliams_at_lifetouch.com <mailto:dwilliams_at_lifetouch.com>
-----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: ml-errors_at_fatcity.com [ mailto:ml-errors_at_fatcity.com
<mailto:ml-errors_at_fatcity.com> ] On
> Behalf Of Michael Milligan
> Sent: 21 October 2003 17:49
> To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
> Subject: Your new book
> >
>
>
>
> >
-- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net -- Author: DENNIS WILLIAMS INET: DWILLIAMS_at_LIFETOUCH.COM Fat City Network Services -- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.com San Diego, California -- Mailing list and web hosting services --------------------------------------------------------------------- To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: ListGuru_at_fatcity.com (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net -- Author: Cary Millsap INET: cary.millsap_at_hotsos.com Fat City Network Services -- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.com San Diego, California -- Mailing list and web hosting services --------------------------------------------------------------------- To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: ListGuru_at_fatcity.com (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).Received on Wed Oct 22 2003 - 21:54:25 CDT
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