WDVL interviews Tom Kyte, author of Expert One-on-One: Oracle
October 23, 2001
1. What were the major issues that you tried to highlight in the book?
The major issue I was trying to get across was a simple one, one that
we put right on the back of the book "You can treat Oracle as a block
box and just stick data into it or you can understand how it works and
exploit it as a powerful computing environment". My goal was to help
people understand how it works and then exploit it as a powerful
computing environment. To this end I opened the book with a chapter
chock full of anecdotal stories the describe how lack of understanding
of how the database functions will ultimately lead to disaster as you
try to grow and scale your system up. Once I get the point across as
to the importance of understanding the database, I spend the rest of
the book explaining it. The first few chapters cover the architecture
and implementation of various database features such as locking,
concurrency control, transactions, redo, rollback, they myriad of table
implementations provide and likewise for indexes. Just understanding
this material would satisfy my goal of "understanding" the database.
If you master all of those topics -- you by definition have a great
understanding of Oracle and how it works.
The rest of the book is about exploiting Oracle -- I cover some of the
tools such as import/export, sqlldr, tkprof, and statspack. Then there
are 13 more chapters that go into detail on specific Oracle features
that I feel you should know about. Topics such as Java Stored
Procedures, Fine Grained Access Control, Analytic Function and
Materialized views are covered in a similar manner. I started with
"What is this feature all about" followed by "Why you want to use
this feature" and "How to use this feature". When applicable --
there would be a section on errors you might encounter with a
particular feature and how to overcome or avoid them.
The last section of the book is some 200 pages on how to use many
of the supplied packages Oracle provides (and no one seems to use).
This really fits into the exploiting theme -- anytime you don't have
to write the code that's a good thing. There are many packages that
virtually every application should use; yet most do not. After
reading this section -- hopefully that won't be the case anymore.
2. How did you find the writing experience?
This was my first book. I wasn't really sure what to expect. In the
beginning it went a little slowly (all the time in the world or so it
seemed). In the end it was light speed.
We started with an outline for an 800-page book but as we now know --
it is over 1,200 pages! That was due in part to an overhaul of the
outline midway through the book. Until I actually started writing,
it was hard to see how everything was going to fall into place. I
found the original outline was missing some key components -- things
necessary to get the point across. The book at that point would have
been about "exploiting Oracle" -- but not so much understanding it.
As we felt that was a key component of the book, we adjusted the
outline to accommodate that. The result was a much better overall
book. It did tend to slow us down a bit however.
Near the end, juggling the book, my regular job, answering questions
on asktom.oracle.com and having a family life was a bit tough --
there were quite a few later then normal nights, especially during
the rewrites. The rewrites as well were fairly trying. With all of
the effort I had put into the book -- the detailed comments the
reviewers had were sometimes disheartening (I had literally some of
the best people related to Oracle reviewing this book -- people
revered in the field, they were almost always correct in their
comments). As time went on however, you stop taking it personally and
understand that they are trying to help you make the best book -- not
just nit-picking your material. I incorporated a large percentage of
their comments (and this made the book even bigger -- I don't think
any chapter "shrunk" during the rewrite but many grew in size).
All in all, I'm glad I did it -- I'll have a much better idea of what
to expect if there is a next time. It was a rewarding experience in
total.
3. What do you consider to be the major developments in Oracle
at the moment?
That's easy -- two words: 9i and 9iAS. Oracle9i, the latest release
of Oracle, was released at about the same time as this book I've been
giving a class to Oracle Sales Consultants describing many of the new
features -- it takes 8 hours and even then only if I talk really fast.
There is a lot of new stuff in there. 9i focuses on a couple of major
areas such as:
- manageability
- availability
- reliability
- security
- XML
9iAS on the other hand, is our Application server. The key component
of 9iAS is a fully J2EE compliant environment for developers to use
to build their applications with. In addition to supporting the
functionality of the existing OAS (Oracle Application Server) product,
9iAS is a total rework incorporating this new J2EE engine.
Excerpt from Expert One-on-One: Oracle - Chapter 1
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