Oracle Core: Essential Internals for DBAs and Developers (Expert's Voice in Databases) Paperback – 6 Dec. 2011

Appears light but heavy reading in places. But thats what I expected and wanted. I got list in a few places as Mr L. Skipped over some areas he may have thought were obvious.Overall though, exactly what youd expect if you have any familiarity with Mr L.Good to read and then refer back to.If I could have asked for more it would have been a 'create an artificial scenario to show this area in action/failure' examples. But that would, for me, just be icing. Certainly not an omission.Not quite on a par with but to me like my old K&R book. Ie not sure you can get much more authorititive on a subject.Cant really fault it.

Oracle Core is a book about how Oracle really works - the internal secrets (or the core of Oracle). Jonathan takes away a lot of the details you often read about in other Oracle books: The stuff you'll also find in the Oracle documentation. In an nice and easy way Jonathan explains the core of important features as undo and redo, transactions, locks and latches, and about parsing and optimizing. By reading this book Jonathan - for instance - made me look into block dumps. This, along with Jonathans explainations, have given me some new insite about the Oracle database.

As usual Jonathan has produced a book that covers a subject that is very complex and manages to boil it down to the essentials and explain it in clear language. As he makes clear it is no easy task to decide where to start with Oracle database, but I think that he has done a great job in the way that the book is organized and as usual he has challenged me to think about how the databases I work on day to day are configured.

Great book!