Oracle Insights: Tales of the Oak Table

A Painful, Funny Journey:
I have 14 years of Oracle Experience with some of the busiest and largest transaction systems in the world. This book really hit home for me and brought back a lot of memories of painful times as well as gave me new insights. I have re-read this book twice since getting it amonth ago. It is that good. The Tales of the Oaktable is a skeptic's work of technological history that is funny and hard to put down, but which also provides experienced database professionals roadmaps to solve their pressing problems ( or even see that they have a problem.) The authors take an empirical, rational approach to diagnosing and discovering the most serious problems while providing amusing revelations about the people and organizations they have worked with. Along the way they lift Oracle's skirts and take us out back to show us the dirty laundry and other junk in Oracle's back yard. They provide methods to diagnose and reapir problems in oracle performance as well as enumerate the known pitfalls in project management and database design. Seasoned IT types will groan and laugh during these chapters. They also look at larger architectural, economic, psychological, and philosophical issues which have a direct impact on databases and large information systems. Norgaard's history of computing is quite depressing. And I agree that many of the "new" blood wants to focus on .NET and J2EE - when the real heart and soul is still the data. Oracle Insights DOES require both deep thought and deep, hard-won knowledge of Oracle in order to fully enjoy it. So, if at first you don't like it, then you don't know what you don't know.

I want more books like this one!:
I really don't know where I should begin writing this review to give the book a proper credit that it deserves. Hmm...FUN - I think that this word best describes this collection of essays (eleven prominent authors instead of more usual one or two, certainly helped a lot). Can't remember when was the last time that I read technical book that kept me reading and reading, and reading - simply because all essays were *fun* to read. To be clear, yes I'm an Oracle geek, but I don't think you have to be an expert to understand 'the point' in the majority of the book, on contrary, if you're by any chance an Oracle newbie you have an opportunity to learn from the true experts (from their work done on the "projects from hell") and pick up some good habits and techniques to start your Oracle career (this book is not really about internals as much as it's about proper design and importance of understanding technology before using it - and using it to the full extent - you'll probably never again write DB agnostic applications, if this was your sin in the past :-). So, being an expert or not, I'm sure you'll get the true 'message' from this book that will stick with you for the rest of your life (of course experts will enjoy reading it slightly more, they'll finally learn, what AFIEDT.BUF is really all about ;-). Finally, thank you guys for writing this book, and Mr. Mogens Noorgard (you lucky *****), thank you for "networking" Oak Table members together. Thank you for reading this review.

Excellent and fascinating read for aspiring Oracle gurus:
As an Oracle and SQL Server DBA for the last seven years I found this book an excellent and very refreshing change from technical manuals and books on Oracle database design and administration. The first few chapters are priceless from Oracle history to the useful read on Oracle tuning using Wait events. I really enjoyed learning how the product evolved from inception to the new version of 10g. All in all money well spent and nice to know that even such gurus as the Oak Table guys are human and have shared tough DBA experiences. Someday I want to meet and work with these guys!

Nearly useless for the advanced DBA:
The book starts off with "A Brief History of Oracle" that lasts 68 of the 395 pages of this book... Then it proceeds with various chapters by noted Oracle gurus which have serious flaws of being too superficial and random in their coverage of Oracle technologies. No aspect of Oracle is covered in depth. Worse yet, some of the authors have devoted far too little of their time on their chapters. Some of the chapters are nothing more than a bunch of philosophical rantings about Oracle and database management. If you are interested in Oracle performance tuning, I recommend books specifically devoted to the subject by a highly regarded author (Cary Milsap and Jonathan Lewis comes to mind). If you are interested in reading half motivated essays by Oracle gurus, then this book fits the bill. If you are unfamiliar with Oracle performance tuning and architecture, this book will offer a lot of interesting insights. But finding good technical nuggets of Oracle architecture and performance tuning will require some lengthy, and often unneccessary, reading.

A Classic:
If you wanna do Oracle DBA/architecture professionally, you'll end up reading this one. Sooner is better than later. Similar in world view to the AskTom site and oracle-l. Database work from the inside....