Effective Oracle by Design

Effective Oracle by Design
Title: Effective Oracle by Design – Design and Build High-Performance Oracle Applications
Author: Thomas Kyte
Published by: Oracle Press
ISBN: 0-07-223065-7
Publication Date: 2003
Details: 664 pages, $59.99; www.OraclePressBooks.com

I recently read this nice book written by Thomas Kyte. In this book Kyte addresses a lot of different design issues that should be made by developers and DBA in order to create a well performant system.

Some of the issues Tom adresses are:

  • Statement processing and bind variables
  • The Cost based optimizer
  • Effective schema design
  • Effective SQL and PL/SQL
  • and many many more

The strong point about this book is that every topic, every issue is explained with very good examples. Tom uses TKPROF, Explain plan etc to show the effects of certain design issues. So at the end of this book you should be able to know how these performance tuning tools work.

The reader of this book could be an Oracle developer, but even more an Oracle DBA. It doesn’t matter which one of the two you are; als long as you are experienced. This book is not written for beginners. The pace is high and Tom doesn’t explain things at a Novice level.

I think this book comes very handy for every Oracle Developer wishing to know more about good performant application design. My overall conclusion was: “Leave it to the Database”. We (developers) tend to use all kind of tricks we know from the past, hoping to make things faster. The new Oracle 9 and 10 databases do these tricks better than we do; that should be your starting point.

One Response

  1. Lucas January 25, 2005