Oracle Database 10g Real Application Clusters Handbook

By far, the best book I have read on the subject of Oracle10g RAC. Given the success of Gopalakrishnan as coauthor of the book "Oracle Wait Interface: A Practical Guide to Performance Diagnostics & Tuning", I was eager to see his work on a subject as involved as Oracle10g RAC. I am happy to say that Gopal did an outstanding and thorough job! Every chapter of this book is clear and well written with accurate demonstrations and valuable illustrations. This book is for both beginners as well as seasoned Oracle professions. What I found most useful was the in-depth coverage of Cache Fusion and Global Resource Directory as well as a thorough troubleshooting section. The author also provides extensive coverage on installation and architecture concerns, backup and recovery in RAC, performance monitoring, workload balancing and distribution, connection management, as well as application development and extensions to the RAC architecture. Oracle's Automatic Storage Management (ASM) feature is fully explained as well as many other basic and advanced administration topics. The only area of improvement I would suggest is greater coverage on backing up and recovering the two key Oracle Clusterware shared components: the Voting Disk and the Oracle Cluster Registry File. Although the book does contain information pertaining to backing up and recovering these resources, I felt that these two files are critical enough to the operation of Oracle Clusterware that a full working example would be helpful. Possibly a workshop that fully details how to recover a voting disk and cluster registry file after the loss of both files. I would highly recommend this book to DBA's and Developers tasked with working in an Oracle10g RAC environment. You will not be disappointment!

Just got this much expected book from Gopal! Absolutely fantastic...It is certainly very detailed and in-depth was my immediate impression. Many topics are detailed, exhaustive and to the point. It is different to the other RAC books available in the market and also this book is platform independent. I am very impressed with this one because it is unique and the style of writing is great, not to mention the depth and clarity of the chapters. I would like to agree with the other person who has commented that we need lot of attention and concentration to read this book. If you have a RAC database, nothing like it to try the example demonstrations provided in the book. Not everyone will be fortunate to have a 4 node RAC to test the possible cache fusion scenarios explained in this book. But the author has prepared a very effective demonstration to reveal the internal operations of the cache fusion. A lot of topics like internal of resource mastering/remastering, two pass recovery and past images are dealt to the core. Another unique in the book is a discussion on extended RAC (most commonly known as stretch clusters or geo clusters) and discussions on Application development for RAC. Overall, it is an excellent text on RAC and worth for your investment on Time and money. There are so less books with good quality and content. It is worth the wait and I hope you won't be disappointed.

Following up on his previous runaway bestseller success with the Oracle Wait Interface book, 'X$KG' Gopal has outdone himself yet again! Whether you are a newbie looking to take your first dive into RAC or an experienced DBA looking desperately for help navigating the murky waters of RAC, THIS is THE book for you. KG has cleverly, yet simply crystallized his vast experience with this product into easily understandable, yet deep content. He has explained Advanced RAC concepts (Part IV) with adequate examples that makes it easy to digest this information overload. This book will be a well-thumbed one in my repertoire, along with other books from the best of the best.

Absolutely fantastic! But do not be misled by the "handbook" term. It is not just the handbook with list of commands, couple of scripts or syntax. It goes more deeply in to the internals of the RAC infrastructure. For example Cache Fusion and Global Resources Directory have dedicated chapters. In my private opinion currently there is no other source of knowledge about RAC technology which covers it in so deep & complete way. As author has mentioned in the introduction this book seems to provide solid background and fundamentals of RAC, which can be a baseline for every RAC DBA. After book lecture, DBA can use received theory to dig into the technology and understand it in practical manner. If I can do something to improve it I would prefer to have more details about CRS troubleshooting. This technology is quite new and still there is no good review point on what to do when something will go wrong with it.

These days, we find a lot of books on Oracle Technology flooding the market in tandem with the product announcements. Most of the books just rehash the standard (or even beta) documentation, or published metalink notes. This book is certainly does not belong to that category. First of all, I find that this is the first book which tries to present an accurate picture of RAC. This book clearly demonstrates that RAC is the improved version of OPS and shows the evoluation path of OPS to RAC. I suppose most of the people who have worked on Oracle for a long time will agree with that statement. Most of the current books in the market that I get to read just tend to follow what Oracle marketing says, that RAC is not OPS. Notably, this is the first ever book on RAC, that has shown me how cache fusion really works. Cache fusion is the secret of RAC and not many people knows how they work under the hood. In this book the author has clearly demonstrated how the resources are mastered, how the locks are coverted and that a row level locks (transaction locks) are different to a buffer locks (Global Cache locks). There are places where the author has used block dumps to explain the internal implementations. What I see is that the author has tried his best to concentrate on concepts and inner workings of various things inside RAC. In that sense, this book is well stocked with lengthy discussions for the RAC hungry technicians. the book requires a lot of attention (and sometimes repeated readings) and certainly this is not bed time reading! The beginning is light and interesting, especially the history of OPS which is difficult to find and collate.I really enjoyed reading the Global Resource Directory chapter along with the Cache Fusion. Many other chapters are worth a mention including the Backup and Recovery, Performance Tuning (No wonder,the author has another best selling oracle performance tuning book!) and Application Development. The consistency and approach is great and the author has tried to keep things in context, most of the times. The author has managed to touch many topics in RAC though some of them could have been lengthier and more conclusive. One last thing, If you want to buy a book just to get the bunch of day to day commands for RAC and plan to work on RAC, please do not buy this book. You will be thoroughly disappointed as this book doesn't belong to that category. It only tells us how things works internally, what are the concepts behind the scenes and not the magic commands to administer RAC. As a whole, I find this book a very enriching reference/concepts book to read when I don't know how something works in RAC. If there is a secret in RAC, there is a good chance you might find it in this book rather than any other. Contents in this book are generally not seen in other RAC books that I have read and the quality of presentation is much better. Good buy but prepare for some heavy reading.!! I recommend this book to every DBA (even