Dennis, Thanks. In fact, I feel the same way about this as many of you who have written about the book in the prior two days. I think the material that ended up being Part II needed to be studied, refined, and documented. And I believe it is important that this material be written in a BOOK instead of only in some electronic medium. Without Part II, I'm not sure many readers would have accepted the possibility of the rather remarkable results I promise in Parts I and III.
As it happens, Part II seems to have begun serving a number of uses, some of which I didn't anticipate, including: - Those who want to take our work further can do so without having to reinvent everything we've learned. - Those who want to debate our approach can argue about it on an unambiguous technical foundation. - Forcing ourselves to write everything down in a consumer-ready format guided our making the Hotsos Profiler into a much more robust and complete product than it would have been otherwise. - Similarly, it tightened the content in our educational courses considerably. We now have excellent training material for Hotsos employees, and perhaps (if O'Reilly is lucky) university students of Oracle performance analysis around the world. - Funny enough, it turns out that some of the MySQL guys are at least considering the idea to integrate much better response time instrumentation into their kernel as a result of the book. But Mr. Milligan is absolutely right: you don't have to be able to prove why something works in order to use it. I tried to design Parts I and III to give you what you need to make the method work, regardless of whether you are interested in proving out the theory. I just didn't feel like it would be responsible to sell Part III without including Part II. Cary Millsap Hotsos Enterprises, Ltd. http://www.hotsos.com Upcoming events: - Performance Diagnosis 101: 10/28 Phoenix, 11/19 Sydney - SQL Optimization 101: 12/8-12 Dallas - Hotsos Symposium 2004: March 7-10 Dallas - Visit www.hotsos.com for schedule details... -----Original Message----- DENNIS WILLIAMS Sent: Wednesday, October 22, 2003 6:15 PM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L I think Cary deserves a vote of appreciation for Part II of his book. I feel (based on the comments of others, haven't waded through it myself yet) that he has put Oracle performance tuning on a solid mathematical foundation. My first education was engineering and I learned was that a practice that rests on a solid mathematical foundation is not easily overturned. A great example for we DBAs is relational database theory, which rests on relational algebra. Fads come and go that threaten to obsolete the relational database, but since none of them has a solid mathematical foundation, they soon fade. If you gave me a quiz on relational algebra today, I'd probably flunk it, like many people that daily work with relational databases. But that doesn't stop us from making use of the fruits of the theory. Similarly, I don't think we need to understand Part II in detail to successfully use Cary's methods to tune an Oracle database. Dennis Williams DBA Lifetouch, Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -----Original Message----- Sent: Wednesday, October 22, 2003 4:10 PM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L I also am not Cary ..... I have however read Cary's book from cover to cover (including spending rather too long on a romantic weekend in paris with my wife contemplating a 10046 trace parsing project :(). I Am rereading and intend to require my fellow DBAs and sysadmins to read it. However to attempt to answer your questions. Yes it is different from every other tuning book out there (though there is *some* overlap with Christpher Lawson's 'the art and science of oracle performance tuning'). The difference is exactly in the approach - the central thesis of the book is (something like) that by utilizing well specified and targeted extended sqltrace data for problem user actions the Oracle performance analyst can quickly and efficiently resolve Oracle performance problems that debilitate the business performance of Oracle based systems. This approach - to target problem business processes, find out why they run slowly and optimize them, is exactly what the RDBMS world needs (IMO). In addition the method Cary and Jeff describe predicts when it will (and more importantly) won't be of use. Is it more readable than others? Here I do have some reservations. The first and last third of the book are extremely readable, and the character and humour of the authors shines through. The formal central section will put off some (maybe a significant number) of readers though. Stephen Hawking in 'A Brief History of Time' writes "Someone told me that each equation I put in the book would halve the sales. I therefore resolved not to have any equations at all. In the end, however, I did put in one equation, Einstein's famous equation E=mc˛." Cary and Jeff have either not been given this advice, or ignored it in the interests of accuracy. The advantage that this gives is that the book has a formal methodology that puts others to shame - the disadvantage is that folk look at pages filled with equations full of queueing theory and Greek symbols and react badly. I hope that the advice is wrong, but fear that it may not be. Niall > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [ mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ] On > Behalf Of Michael Milligan > Sent: 21 October 2003 17:49 > To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L > Subject: Your new book > > > Cary, > > I don't mean to ask you to brag, but can you please tell me > if your new book, of which I've heard good things, is > different in any way than other Oracle Performance Tuning > books out. Does it take a different approach? Does it teach > different methodologies? Is it more readable? I'd be very > interested in your own assessment. What did you try to > accomplish with this book? > > TIA, > > Michael Milligan > Oracle DBA > Ingenix, Inc. > 2525 Lake Park Blvd. > Salt Lake City, Utah 84120 > wrk 801-982-3081 > mbl 801-628-6058 > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > This e-mail, including attachments, may include confidential > and/or proprietary information, and may be used only by the > person or entity to which it is addressed. If the reader of > this e-mail is not the intended recipient or his or her > authorized agent, the reader is hereby notified that any > dissemination, distribution or copying of this e-mail is > prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error, please > notify the sender by replying to this message and delete this > e-mail immediately. > -- > Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net <http://www.orafaq.net> > -- > Author: Michael Milligan > INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > Fat City Network Services -- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.com <http://www.fatcity.com> > San Diego, California -- Mailing list and web hosting services > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message > to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') > and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB > ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed > from). You may also send the HELP command for other > information (like subscribing). > -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net -- Author: DENNIS WILLIAMS INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services -- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.com San Diego, California -- Mailing list and web hosting services --------------------------------------------------------------------- To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). -- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net -- Author: Cary Millsap INET: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fat City Network Services -- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.com San Diego, California -- Mailing list and web hosting services --------------------------------------------------------------------- To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).
