I found out today why my review of the new Jonathan Lewis book hadn’t appeared on Amazon. Apparently it violated their review guidelines and they didn’t want to publish it. I’ve resubmitted a shorter review, removing everything I thought might be a problem, so I have my own ideas, but I’d be interested to hear what others think the problem was? (Oh, and ‘being badly-written nonsense’ isn’t allowed!)
To save you looking at the other posting, here it is again.
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It’s my favourite Oracle book of the many I’ve read (apologies to Tom Kyte) and I’m not expecting it to be surpassed any time soon.
Despite being a fan of Jonathan’s work, I probably didn’t like Practical Oracle 8i as much as others did. Not because it wasn’t a great book in parts but because it didn’t hang together properly for me. I felt the same way about Steve Adam’s Oracle Internals book – great material but I wasn’t sure how well it worked as a book.
This book is different. It takes a complex and essential component of the Oracle architecture and teaches it from the basics up to the complex using an elegant tutorial style. Jonathan doesn’t stint on the deep detail that’s necessary to understand the subject but he doesn’t baffle you with science either. You might need to read it a little more slowly and carefully than you would some third-party Oracle books, and play around with the plentiful small examples, but that’s because you’re getting enough information to justify the purchase cost (and much more) and you know when you get to the end that you’ll understand the subject *properly*. With that understanding, it’ll be much easier to work out why the CBO is doing something that you’ve never seen it do before. As always with technical subjects, everything springs from the fundamentals.
No matter what your involvement with Oracle is, you can not avoid the optimiser. Have you ever watched Oracle consultants, contractors, developers or DBAs deciphering execution plans as best they can and then flailing around trying out different solutions until they get lucky? (and then everyone thinks they’re a magician!) More honestly, how often do you find yourself deciphering execution plans as best you can and then flailing …. (you get the picture). One of the reasons why people struggle with the CBO is that Oracle’s documentation of the CBO isn’t great. I love Oracle documentation in general but I think Jonathan’s book blows any Oracle CBO documentation out of the water. (As he highlights in the book, the CBO is difficult to document well because it’s a constantly moving target.) I bet you there’ll be plenty of people in Oracle Support with this book on their desk!
If you think you’re a serious Oracle professional, you should own this book, devour the contents and experience plenty of those moments when the lights go on and you think – ‘Oh, right, so *that’s* why it does that’. That includes DBAs who’ll learn something new about how their decisions on free lists, block sizes and so on can affect application performance. I can’t imagine that there is anyone out there who won’t learn something new from this book and you’ll finally be able to take a *structured approach* to solving CBO problems instead of just guessing.
Remember when not many people had read Tom Kyte’s ‘Expert One-on-One’ book and you were at a distinct advantage because you had? Yet you still felt you had to spread the word because it was so good? Now that many more people have read Tom’s book, the penny is starting to drop about bind variables, the dangers of database independent applications and so on.
That’s what this book is like. An absolute classic and the only book you’ll ever need to understand the cost based optimiser (apart perhaps for Volumes Two and Three that will cover more specialised subjects).
Buy it – you won’t be disappointed.
Did they say which bit of their guidelines it violated? Was it too long, for example?
Was it because you is Scotch ?
Seriously, I thought it was an excellent review.
If that is indicative of Amazon’s guideleines, I won’t waste any time writing a review for them.
Did they consider the review was )_too_ favourable ?
Howard – I thought it was too long as well, but when I submitted the new review I noticed that they stop you submitting more than 1000 words anyway, which is theit limit. They have made some vague suggestions that I might post later, but I was interested in what others thought without seeing them. I’m also not sure I want to start reproducing their email.
Andy,
If they thought it was too favourable, I’d need to start pulling up some other reviews I’ve seen!
But I think you’re right, it’s because I is Scotch (which will make not much sense to anyone outside of the UK and I’ve hardly seen Ali G anyway, but I like that catchphrase 😉 )
Yeah, well I just raved on their site about The Tyrannicide Brief, of course, and that sailed through within minutes… so favourable-ness can’t be an issue.
I wonder whether it’s because you don’t actually discuss the book much?! You talk about other books on tuning. You talk about Jonathan’s previous book. You talk about the difficulty of documenting the optimiser. But there’s not much upfront which yells “Buy this, it’s good!” Well, OK, it’s there in the last sentence, but maybe their guideline is that you shouldn’t have to read that long to work it out?
And there’s not much that lets a reader of your review know what’s actually in the book, why they’d need it, and so on.
Just a thought and a bit of idle speculation on my part.
wonder if it was the first paragraph – which if you didn’t know the community might not be read properly.
I’d certainly say that you could read the references to Tom and Steve’s books as using a review of one product to disparage another.
I know full well that that isn’t the case, but it could be read like that.
Thanks for all of the comments, folks, they did map on fairly well to what I thought the problems might be.
Howard – “I wonder whether it’s because you don’t actually discuss the book much?! You talk about other books on tuning. You talk about Jonathan’s previous book. You talk about the difficulty of documenting the optimiser. …
And there’s not much that lets a reader of your review know what’s actually in the book, why they’d need it, and so on.”
I agree and I needed to read it more critically to see that. I was just a bit over-excited about the book and didn’t notice it at first when I re-read the review to see what the problem was. It isn’t a very good ‘review’ after all, more of a personal comment. In fact, in the words of their email …
“detailed, critical and specific commentary about books.
Reviews that fall outside of these guidelines – for example, that
are vague, spiteful, too short or too long, contain inappropriate
information or are better suited to a chat room forum – will not be
posted.”
I can’t say I agree that they seem to apply those rules across the board, based on other customer reviews I’ve read. I also think that they have plenty of space for formal descriptions, contents and their own review, so I wouldn’t want to just imitate that, but in retrospect it isn’t specific enough.
Tom and Niall – Your comments where the closest to what I already thought the problem might be. I was being specific about people who a prospective purchaser might not know and wasn’t completely positive about their previous books, so I took all of that out of the second review I submitted. They were comments that would make most sense to the Oracle community, but perhaps those people will be buying the book anyway so there’s less reason to encourage them to?
In retrospect, I’m glad they rejected it because I can see what their problems were, but my first reaction was ‘Eh? What’s the problem?’. I think the key thing here is that they’re looking for a *review* and not just some informal personal comment. However, I’d stand by most of what I said and I’ve resubmitted it with a few sections removed. It is a customer review after all and reflects the way one customer expresses things.
What I’m most annoyed about it is that, if someone reviews it, why can’t they send a standard email saying that it’s been rejected? It wasn’t until I asked where it was that they let me know.
Back to work …
Just after posting my last comment, I noticed the replacement review has now been published.
http://tinyurl.com/cq8tq
It’s still no masterpiece for sure, but I think this version does work better while being true to my informal intentions.
It was looking lonely on the UK site without a review 🙁
Keep on reading and reviewing Doug. I think next year could see you make the leap to an prestigous Amazon ‘Top 100 Reviewer’
Andy,
I don’t think that will happen! 😉
Cheers,
Doug