Book Review – Oracle 11g New Features

I remember I said I wouldn’t do this any more, but last October, someone from Oracle Press contacted me by email because they’d noticed the following words on my website.

“However, those aspects are well dealt with in Oracle Wait Interface: A Practical Guide to Performance Diagnostics and Tuning by multiple authors. I usually don’t get along with Oracle Press books, but this is much better than most …”

He wanted to know if I’d like to take a look at any of their recent releases. I replied that I didn’t mind as long as he realised that a) I’m pretty busy and have a growing pile of unread books to attend to and b) I couldn’t guarantee what I might say about the book, but would give an honest appraisal. We agreed I would pick a couple of books from a list and they would send me complimentary copies. The two books were :-

Oracle Database 11g New Features by Robert Freeman (with Arup Nanda)

and

Oracle ASM Under-the-Hood and Practical Deployment Guide by Nitin Vengurlekar, Murali Vallath and Rich Long.

I picked these two as hopefully including some information that would be new to me. The list of authors on the latter is a complete coincidence, but I think it might make sense for me to avoid reviewing it because I’ve had recent dealings with *one* of the authors (I don’t know all of them). It’s a shame, though, because I remember Lutz Hartmann raving about it to me at Openworld after I’d picked it as one of interest. (I noticed recently that Jason Arneil has a review of this book on his blog. I suppose Oracle Press are keen to use the blogging community for free publicity, or perhaps it’s just a coincidence.)

The 11g New Features book turned up a few weeks ago and, despite being determined to leave it until I’d caught up on some other books, I couldn’t resist taking a look and found myself finishing it over the course of a couple of evenings. I must confess it only served to confirm my previous judgements of Oracle Press books, although perhaps the contents seemed more accurate than I’ve been used to. The main problems I’d highlight are :-

1) It seems very light and fluffy, but I accept it might not seem that way to someone less experienced. It’s almost impossible for me to judge that accurately despite previous experience recommending books to course attendees. Suffice to say that I know some people like light reading material, but I was left feeling unsatisfied on finishing the book, as though I’d wasted my time trawling through it.

2) I’m not sure what the purpose of the book is. There’s an 11g New Features Guide which is free to download (and print a copy if you prefer reading from paper, as I do). Which begs the question, why would anyone want to pay good money for a book that’s a distillation of the vendor documentation? Well, I think you could make the same argument about all Oracle-related books, unless they can add either

a) Practical and independent advice based on substantial experience of how the features work in practice, but that’s a little difficult for any New Features book; or

b) Information that’s not exposed in the documentation but has been worked out through investigation.

There is an attempt to address a) in Arup Nanda’s comments that are scattered throughout the book, highlighting the features he views as the most important and why, but it was too small a part of the book for me and when there is more information like this in free online resources that in a book that you need to pay for, it’s disappointing. I found myself asking the question – who is this book for? If it’s for experienced DBAs to get up to speed on 11g, then it simply isn’t substantial enough. If it’s for inexperienced DBAs, then wouldn’t they be better either learning the fundamentals first and picking up 11g from online resources, or just waiting for an 11g DBA book to appear. Even then, maybe the 2-day DBA guide would be as useful?

On the plus side, I do think the presentation aspects of the book are better than Oracle Press books I’ve read in the past and I welcomed the trimming of the lengthy author dedications at the start of the book. (I remember buying one Oracle Press book that had 20-30 pages of the stuff!) I also found it very readable and slightly less overbearingly friendly than similar books I’ve read in the past, so I have no complaint with the writing.

In essence, I didn’t find myself hating the book as I read it (which is not unknown) or despairing at constant technical errors. Unfortunately, reading this book felt like eating a Big Mac, rather than a steak.

See, this is why I should stick to my guns and not review books, because I nearly always find them disappointing, but I felt it was rude to say no and I still want to be able to praise those books that I enjoy. After reading this, I was quite annoyed with myself for not reading Tapio’s Indexing book on those two evenings 🙁