Oracle databases are powerful and complex. This book provides a manageable introduction to Oracle 11g administration issues. Instead of focusing on exhaustive technical information, the author relies on his personal experience to offer specific guidelines and recommendations. Anyone who needs an overview of Oracle administration will benefit from this book:

If you are an IT professional who has been thrust into an Oracle database administration role without the benefit of formal training, or just want to understand how Oracle Database works, then I wrote this book for you.

The book consists of four parts that are divided into 17 chapters. Each chapter concludes with a summary, exercises, and a relevant list of references. Part 1, “Database Concepts,” provides basic background about relational databases and Oracle in three chapters. Chapter 1, “Relational Database Management Systems,” explains some basic concepts about relational databases. Chapter 2, “SQL and PL/SQL,” introduces the structured query language (SQL) and Oracle’s procedural language (PL)/SQL, which are essential for the tasks of an Oracle database administrator. Finally, chapter 3, “Oracle Architecture,” is a short presentation of the main components of Oracle. Readers need to be familiar with chapter 3 in order to understand the rest of the book; inexperienced readers will probably need to refer to other sources.

Part 2, “Database Implementation,” consists of five chapters. Chapter 4, “Planning,” emphasizes the importance of assessing license, architecture, and sizing options. Chapter 5, “Software Installation,” describes a basic procedure to install Oracle. Chapter 6, “Database Creation,” describes the process of creating a database, including the “Next-Next-Next; click Finish” and manual methods, and some post-creation and basic administration tasks. Chapter 7, “Physical Database Design,” explores indexes, partitions, denormalization techniques, materialized views, and clusters. Chapter 8, “User Management and Data Loading,” describes user management tasks--creating/removing users and granting/revoking privileges--and using different import and export utilities for data loading.

Part 3, “Database Support,” consists of seven chapters. Chapter 9, “Taking Control,” introduces some tools that help with exploring and administering a database, such as Enterprise Manager, SQL Developer, and Remote Diagnostic Agent. Chapter 10, “Monitoring,” focuses on the important task of monitoring different aspects of the database, such as availability, changes, security, backups, growth, workload, performance, and capacity. Chapter 11, “Fixing Problems,” explains the important difference between incident management and problem management; the difference is illustrated with a real-life problem, which is tackled by following the systematic five-step problem-solving method described in Lawson’s book [1]. Chapter 12, “Backups,” focuses on the important task of saving data to protect the information in the event of unexpected failures; the importance of this task is exemplified by various horror stories. Chapter 13, “Recovery,” explains how to repair the database by using the backups. Chapter 14, “Database Maintenance,” focuses on the different aspects that must be considered in a maintenance plan. Chapter 15, “The Big Picture and the Ten Deliverables,” provides the big picture of information technology (IT) and describes ten deliverables of the database administration role. According to the author, this is the book’s most important chapter. The rationale behind this claim is that if you know what needs to be done, you can always find the technical way to do it.

Part 4, “Database Tuning,” consists of two chapters. Chapter 16, “Instance Tuning,” considers once again the five-step problem-solving approach described in chapter 11, although this time from the perspective of performance tuning. Chapter 17, “SQL Tuning,” presents and exemplifies some techniques that make a SQL statement more efficient.

In conclusion, this interesting and pleasant introduction to Oracle administration offers useful, practical advice. The consideration of different tools, the references provided, and the inclusion of examples and personal experiences will benefit novice administrators. However, readers should not expect to become knowledgeable in all aspects of Oracle administration or be able to understand the details of all the procedures explained in the book. For in-depth knowledge, one needs to resort to other extensive bibliographic references and, of course, learn through personal experience: “The book you really need will never be found in bookstores. ... You’re going to have to write that book yourself.”