Secrets of the Oracle Database
Secrets of the Oracle Database is the definitive guide to undocumented and partially documented features of the Oracle database server. Covering useful but little–known features from Oracle9i Database through Oracle Database 11g, this book will improve your efficiency as an Oracle database administrator or developer. Norbert Debes shines the light of day on features that help you master more difficult administrative, tuning, and troubleshooting tasks than you ever thought possible.
Finally, in one place, you have at your fingertips knowledge that previously had to be acquired through years of experience and word of mouth through knowing the right people. What Norbert writes is accurate, well–tested, well–illustrated by clear examples, and sure to improve your ability to make an impact in your day–to–day work with Oracle.
What you’ll learn
- Take advantage of Oracle’s built–in Perl DBI distribution to write applications for monitoring, benchmarking, data extraction, and more.
- Interpret the undocumented, extended trace file format to pinpoint performance problems that TKPROF reports overlook and obscure.
- Get the most out of Statspack by using undocumented report formatting options, accessing its scarcely–documented repository, and integrating with SQL Trace.
- Take control of your instance through the ill–documented ORADEBUG command, enabling you to control processes, trace SQL statements, dump process state, monitor wait events and the call stack, and much more.
- Leverage undocumented features in Oracle’s built–in scheduler to better automate your workload.
- Take full advantage of Transparent Application Failover and Cluster Database Services in a Real Application Cluster environment.
Who is this book for?
Secrets of the Oracle Database is written for database administrators and developers well past the beginner level who desire to take full advantage of the power the Oracle platform has to offer. The book is by no means an introductory book. Readers should already be familiar and comfortable with SQL and PL/SQL, and should have a good grounding in Oracle database architecture.
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Useful Book Even without a Lot of Real Undocumented Secrets,
The “Secrets of the Oracle Database” book with the subtitle of “Advanced administration, tuning, and troubleshooting using undocumented features” follows the same pattern as most of the other Apress books, with very well researched and verified information with careful references to well regarded books and external resources. Many code samples and demonstrations are provided throughout the book in the format of: tell me about something, and then show me/prove to me that it actually works. The topics in this book reminded me a bit of the topics discussed in the book “Oracle 10g Insider Solutions,” except for the fact that the “Secrets of the Oracle Database” book actually makes an effort (a very thorough effort) at indicating which features are available with each version of Oracle (through 11.1.0.7), which features require additional cost licenses (such as the use of AWR), and provides a good enough example of the features so that the feature may be utilized with an understanding of why the feature should be used. The “Secrets of the Oracle Database” book even does a thorough job indicating the permissions and/or roles needed to leverage the various features. Specific items that I found to be helpful:
* In most cases, commands are provided for Linux/Unix and the equivalents for Windows.
* Good description of SYS.AUX_STATS and the various functions to view and populate the CPU stats are described in the book.
* Very detailed description of raw 10046 trace files.
* Detailed listing of the purpose of the various database tables related to Statspack.
* Good summary of ORADEBUG functionality.
* Provides a warning not to adjust the hidden (underscore) parameters unless under the supervision of Oracle support.
With the above in mind, why not give the book a 5 out of 5 rating?
* Several Oracle features/behavior which are described as undocumented are in fact fairly well documented and/or discussed in Metalink notes, on various Oracle related blogs, and various Internet forums: Page 143 describes ALTER USER IDENTIFIED BY VALUES as being undocumented while it is documented in Metalink (279355.1 last modified 27-OCT-2008 and 1051962.101 last modified 16-OCT-2008) and on several websites. Page 136 states that the TRACE=TRUE parameter for the exp/imp and expdp/impdp utilities is undocumented while it is documented in a couple Metalink notes (271782.1 last modified 17-JAN-2005 and 286496.1 last modified 21-APR-2009) . Page 337 states that DBMS_SYSTEM is undocumented while it is documented in a couple Metalink notes (286496.1 last modified 21-APR-2009 and 103267.1 last modified 20-NOV-2002 and 436036.1 last modified 09-MAR-2009 and DBMS_SUPPORT is described in 62294.1 last modified 25-OCT-2002), several books, and several websites. Pages 271 and 371 state that the 10046 trace file format is undocumented while it is documented in a couple Metalink notes (39817.1 last modified 09-DEC-2008 and 376442.1 last modified 25-JUN-2009), two books referenced by this book (“Optimizing Oracle Performance” and “Troubleshooting Oracle Performance”), and several websites. Page 299 states that “it is undocumented which parameter changes force the optimizer to consider a new plan,” after showing how changing OPTIMIZER_INDEX_COST_ADJ forced a change in the execution plan – but the book never went on to suggest checking V$SES_OPTIMIZER_ENV, V$SQL. OPTIMIZER_ENV_HASH_VALUE/V$SQL. OPTIMIZER_ENV, or a 10053 trace file.
There also appear to be a couple errors, or at least exceptions to some of the broad rules discussed in the book:
* Page 29 states that “V$PARAMETER is built in such a way that it lists documented (non-hidden) parameters only,” with documented parameters being those which do not begin with one or two underscore characters. This is a correct statement, until one of the hidden parameters is modified, with a command such as the following: ALTER SYSTEM SET “_OPTIMIZER_UNDO_COST_CHANGE”=’10.1.0.4′; (_OPTIMIZER_UNDO_COST_CHANGE is one of those parameters which are adjusted automatically when OPTIMIZER_FEATURES_ENABLE is set to a different value). Once the _OPTIMIZER_UNDO_COST_CHANGE parameter (or likely any _ parameter) is modified, it will then be listed along with the documented parameters in V$PARAMETER (tested on Oracle 10.2.0.2 and 11.1.0.7).
* Page 45 states “Since SELECT statements don’t benefit from unused indexes… it may be worthwhile to drop unused indexes.” Richard Foote’s blog provides evidence that those indexes which appear to be unused indexes may actually provide the cost based optimizer statistical information that it would not otherwise have. Also, not every use of an index is recorded as a use of that index.
Given the title and subtitle of the book, I expected much more insight into the internals of Oracle databases. For instance on page 277 when describing the content of a 10046 trace file, the book…
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|Everything you knew about, but didn’t understand.,
I am so surprised that a book like this has not already been written. In a nutshell, the book contains dozens of snippets of information that you mostly knew about but never had time to understand or learn properly.
As a DBA you’re always on the lookout for those little snippets of info that just allow you to make it through one more project while keeping your sanity. You know those little things like the undocumented dbms_system parameter that allows you to write direct to the alert log, those sort of things. Well this book is jammed packed with a mish-mash of those little tricks you have been collecting for the last X number of years.
The book doesn’t really have any solid structure and the author is pains to state that you simply dip into the book when you have time and pick up another titbit of info, which might come in useful one day.
The book is not for beginners, so if you are a casual user of Oracle don’t bother, you will not not find it useful at all and will waste your money, it is aimed squarely at slightly more experienced DBA and a developer with serious interest in the internals of Oracle, may find it useful. Once again the author is clear at the start, the subjects are glanced over, the book gives you just about enough to get you started and leaves the rest to you to work out. Things like reading raw SQL trace files, one thing the masochist in me has always enjoyed! This book expects you to understand how to read a raw SQL trace to a basic standard before moving on to more advanced aspects of the interpreting them.
There is a great section on using the inbuilt Perl distro that comes with the RDBMS installation, nothing spectacular but extremely useful, saves you having to convince the SA to load this module and that to Oracle connectivity, so you will less of a pain to you Sys Admin when you need to script stuff up!
All sorts of stuff is covered, things like how to use DBMS_PIPE against RMAN to run your RMAN backups from within the DB using schedules, the author is big fan of STATSPACK, proving that it still has some very valid uses when working with performance issues. Lots and lots of stuff about undocumented parameters, lots of info on the more obscure DBMS packages and their uses. Info about the various and little used trace event 10027, 10053 and 10079. The books covers mainly 10g but there are lots of references to the changes in 11g and how things behaved in 9i, so quite broad in scope.
Very please with this book, I read it cover to cover, I simply couldn’t put it down. I would stress again, this is not a tutorial book, most likely you will nothing if you have only a passing interest in Oracle or are just getting started as a DBA, the author expects you to be familiar with a lot of the concepts and ideas and very little introduction is given to each subject.
Another great quality release from Apress, I have yet to find an Oracle book from Apress that I have not thoroughly enjoyed and have not got my money’s worth from!
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