Oracle RAC Performance Tuning (Oracle In-Focus)

Another good book on RAC. If you have a few years of experience administering oracle DBs and are jumping into RAC world, this is the place to start, after the RAC concepts and install manuals. The book discusses the basic principles behind RAC systems, cache fusion, the recommendations for interconnect and how to monitor it, I/O considerations for RAC, memory considerations, what to look for in AWR/ASH reports, benchmark tools, rac monitoring tools, etc. I have been administering RAC for a few years and this book has taught me several things that I should have known before getting into RAC. I also learned about several concepts that can be applied to single instance DBs as well.This book is also much easier to read compared other great books on RAC written by Riyaj Shamsudeen or K Gopalakrishnan. As such, if you are learning RAC concepts, my recommendation would be to read this book before taking on more challenging books like RS or KG's books.

Worthy purchase. Very well written book on RAC. Highly recommend this to anyone looking for that extra on RAC.

Great book!

First, a note on my RAC background: I spent 7 years on Oracle's RAC Support team. When customers had an intractable RAC performance issue, I was on the other end of the "HELP!" line until it was resolved.I made Brian's acquaintance online through the MOS RAC Support forum, where Brian stood out as a frequent poster who consistently gave well-thought-out, accurate and informative responses. So I had high expectations when I sat down with his book. And I haven't been disappointed. This book is a terrific resource for single-instance DBAs looking to come up to speed on RAC. It'll also be useful to more experienced RAC DBAs who want to deepen their knowledge or who just have a thorny performance problem to solve.Many RAC books start out with an overview of RAC-specific physical architecture: the interconnect and the shared storage. Not this one. Brian leaps straight into what I consider the "hard" stuff: chapter 2 covers Cache Fusion and understanding RAC-specific wait events. I've spoken with many RAC DBAs who'd have a hard time telling me the difference between "gc cr block 2-way" and "gc current grant 3-way". You really need to understand Oracle's implementation of Cache Fusion to understand many of the RAC wait events, and Chapter 2 does a good job of explaining, using session tracing to step you through the waits. It might seem odd to start out with detailed explanations of wait events that many RAC DBAs will never see in the Top 10. But, a good understanding of Cache Fusion and the related wait events is really necessary to understand RAC-specific slowdowns. Subsequent chapters depend implicitly on this understanding: you can't really understand interconnect tuning, for instance, unless you understand how the interconnect is used by Cache Fusion.The book covers a full toolkit of testing utilities and tools as needed: Orion is introduced in the chapter on storage, and then a full chapter is devoted to the RAC Support Tools, another to AWR/ADDM/ASH, and another to benchmark utilities. There are also dozens of SQL scripts.Another chapter to highlight is Chapter 14, a two-page summary at the end of the book that lists what Brian considers the central points.This is a mix of broad principles and RAC-specific "gotchas" that every RAC DBA should be aware of. I'd say that if you can read through Chapter 14 and say "I knew that" to each point, then you've got a good grasp of the essentials of RAC tuning.Like others I've read in Burleson's Oracle In-Focus series, this book would've benefited from a stronger copy editor. I was chagrined to see typos right on the back cover. But that's a small quibble that doesn't detract from an excellent book. If you're a RAC DBA, this book deserves a place on your bookshelf.I received a free review copy of this book.

This book gives you what it says on the cover: Oracle RAC Performance Tuning. You will not, for example, find much detail of using Flex Clusters (though he does de-bunk one of the common myths) nor any real mention of policy management, ACFS, or QoS. Perhaps Brian will cover them in his next book. No problem - what you will find is four hundred pages about performance tuning, and they are all worth reading. The author follows similar techniques to those I use, and formalizes them wonderfully. The general methodology is that you cannot tune anything unless you understand it. So most of the book is about how to work out what the hardware, the operating system, and Oracle, are doing; how they are doing it; and why. Understand all that, and the tuning is obvious.The content will be useful for all DBAs, though the level of assumed knowledge is such that this is not for absolute beginners. You do need to be familiar with SQL, PL/SQL, and DB admin; you need to know how to read an execution plan. To put it in Oracle Uni terms, ideally you need to be at OCP level and studying for the OCM and the RAC Specialization. The material goes far beyond what Oracle Uni teaches for those qualifications. Those not yet so familiar with RAC will appreciate the way in which each chapter begins with an exposition of the architectural concept, and those of us who think we know it all will learn from the detail. For example, chapter two starts with a nice description of how the global cache service and global enqueue service work, and then WHAM! A bunch of scripts that show how to track exactly which blocks are being transferred across the interconnect when you select a particular row. The result is a nice combination of architectural detail with plenty of what one might call "tips and tricks". There are chapters on tuning specific elements of a GI environment that are very practical: the interconnect; storage; memory; parallel processing. The chapter "RAC Support Tools" is, for me, the highlight in this category. Other chapters are more theoretical: cache fusion; wait events; AWR, ADDM, ASH.I wish he had written this ten years ago, it would have saved me (and my clients) incalculable hours. I don't agree with everything he says - but that doesn't mean that he is wrong, it just means that I have to do some more research. Whatever your skill level, you will learn from this book. I've seen RAC since release 9.x, and parallel server before that. Even so, Brian has taught me a lot.--John WatsonOracle Certified Master DBAhttp://skillbuilders.com