I previously looked at that book and decided not to purchase it. The books that I review are ones that I purchased – it seems that I either need to be curious about a book (or its author) or believe that I would learn a lot from the book, before I will spend money on a book. I read the reviews on the U.S. Amazon site:

I also read a portion of the book using the Amazon “Look Inside” feature to read a couple of paragraphs from the book. On one of the early pages I found the following statement:

“Those that found Oracle SQL High Performance Tuning useful should find this book a more than adequate substitute for a third edition [of that book].”

I happen to have the second edition of Guy Harrison’s “Oracle SQL High Performance Tuning” book on my bookshelf. While I missed the errors the first time I read that book in 2001, a couple of years ago I flipped through a couple of pages in that book and found several statements that are as true today as they were when the book was written (and were just as true in the year 1840 – in other words, the statements were incorrect). The above quoted statement did not make me curious about the book.

I just quickly scanned through a couple of pages of the “Oracle Performance Survival Guide” book on Amazon. I found a couple of positives in the book and a couple of negatives. Here is what I found during a quick peek in the book:
Page 36:
Mentions using the utlxplan.sql script to create a PLAN_TABLE in your schema, and mentions that this is usually not necessary starting with Oracle 10g because there is a global temporary PLAN_TABLE. Tom Kyte’s book failed to mention the part about 10g, so that is a positive for this book.

Page 37:
The descriptions of the COST, ACCESS_PREDICATES, FILTER_PREDICATES, and possibly a couple of other columns need improvement, either for accuracy or clarity. Much more clarity could have been provided for all of the columns.

Page 46:
The descriptions of the TmpSpc, Reads, and possibly a couple of others needs improvement, either for accuracy or clarity.

Page 47:
When describing the order of execution of operations in an execution plan, the book states “The more heavily indented an access path is, the earlier it is executed. If two steps are indented at the same level, the uppermost statement is executed first.” Let’s just say that the Oracle Performance Tuning book in the Oracle documentation library, even though it too made at least one error, is a bit more correct than this book.

Page 611:
“Most notably, George Moore’s famous Moore’s law postulated that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit increases exponentially, doubling every 1 to 2 years.” George?
“Although disks are slowly getting faster, the rapid increase in the average size of a disk means that the average IO per MB is actually decreasing.” Maybe I took this sentence out of context, but I don’t think that “average IO per megabyte” would be different in 2001 than it is in 2011. The sentence (out of context) might also incorrectly imply that over time a given hard drive will gradually improve in performance, which I am certain was not the intended meaning.

Page 614:
Correctly describes the db file scattered read wait event as reading contiguous blocks, while at least one other book (“Oracle Performance Firefighting”) that I read stated that the blocks being read are actually scattered on the disk.

Page 629:
Seems to imply that RAID 10 and RAID 0+1 are the same thing.

Page 700:
Lists several of the author’s favorite books including: “Troubleshooting Oracle Performance”, “Secrets of the Oracle Database”, “Expert Oracle Database Architecture”, “Cost-Based Oracle Fundamentals”, “Oracle Performance Firefighting”, “Oracle Wait Interface: A Practical Guide to Performance Diagnostics & Tuning”.

Page 701-702:
I can’t argue with the list of blog sites.

In summary, the book could be fantastic with a couple areas that need fine tuning, or the book could be a complete disaster with only a couple of strong points. It appears that a long review of the book was written by someone for the February 2010 NoCOUG Journal (I have not read the full review – just the short version that was posted by the same person to Amazon’s website):
http://www.nocoug.org/Journal/NoCOUG_Journal_201002.pdf

Did you read the following book:

if yes, your opinion concerning this book interests me

regards

Thanks,
S