Every day, all around the world, DBAs are confronted with a multitude of issues dealing with the support of their database environments. This book discusses those issues as they relate to Oracle7, Oracle8 and Oracle8i, together with the strategies for dealing with the ongoing challenges.
I have worked with various relational databases for the last fifteen years. My first acquaintance with a database product started at my very first job as an application developer. The company, Eicher Goodearth Limited, a tractor manufacturer, used Micro Ingres Database, which ran on a BSD UNIX version on a Motorola 68000-based system. The use of vifred, qbe, and qbf tools was very resource-intensive for this small system that supported well over twelve users. I was involved in projects to develop applications for payroll, fixed deposit, shares, human resources, and a few others. Later on, when my boss at Eicher left and joined a company called NIIT, he made sure that I came along with him. At NIIT, which focused on education and consulting, I began developing courseware on UNIX and databases and later taught them nationwide. I finally started consulting on client/servers and on databases such as Oracle and Sybase. Following that I worked at HCL America where I was a consultant in the open systems area until I accepted my present position, where I have been working mainly on Oracle, Informix, and Sybase on UNIX and Windows NT environments. I have been mainly involved in benchmarking, performance and tuning, migrations, and capacity planning. I have also had the opportunity to run the fastest TPC-B benchmark and do a 2 terabyte Oracle benchmark.
This book is intended for readers with some knowledge of Oracle and a basic understanding of an operating system, such as Windows NT or UNIX. You can either go through the book in sequence, or choose any one of the chapters that might interest you. Each chapter includes a Quick Reference table at the beginning to help you locate the appropriate topic.
Unlike other books, all of the scripts in this book have been tested on a production release of the Oracle database, thus ensuring their quality. They were tested on Oracle 8.0.5 and Oracle 8.1.5 production releases.