Books

Book: 

Applied Mathematics for Database Professionals (Expert's Voice)

Author: Toon Koppelaars, Lex de Haan

Publisher: APRESS ACADEMIC (2007)

Binding: Hardcover, 376 pages

This book is about the mathematical foundation of relational databases; it demonstrates how logic and set theory can be used as tools to formally specify database designs, including the data integrity constraints (a main topic of this book). Don't let this scare you of; the book explains the required mathematical concepts with many examples and should be accessible for the regular database professional. It does assume that you are familiar with designing a database.

You'll find three parts in this book:

• Part 1 provides the mathematics. It covers those parts of logic and set theory that are both necessary and sufficient to formally specify database designs and their constraints.
• Part 2 demonstrates the application of these subjects. It gradually develops the formal specification of a ten-table database design that includes over seventy data integrity constraints. You'll also find a treatment of formal query and transaction specification in this part.
• Part 3 is the Oracle specific part. You'll discover that due to poor support of declarative constraints, implementing these in today's SQL DBMS's still poses quite a few challenges. It demonstrates a method—based on database triggers—to implement (multi-row) constraints procedurally. This method has evolved for over 12 years; it is an efficient one and one that cannot be subverted.

 
It is important to understand the mathematical foundation of our database profession. The knowledge contained in this book will, in the end, enable you to better design and implement databases

Book: 

Troubleshooting Oracle Performance, Hardback

Author: Christian Antognini

Publisher: APRESS ACADEMIC (2008)

Binding: Hardcover, 584 pages

What do you do when your database application isn’t running fast enough? You troubleshoot, of course. Finding the slow part of an application is often the easy part of the battle. It’s finding a solution that’s difficult. Troubleshooting Oracle Performance helps by providing a systematic approach to addressing the underlying causes of poor database application performance.
 
This book shows you how to do the following:

• Identify performance problems using a systematic and repeatable approach.
• Configure the query optimizer to meet your application performance goals.
• Obtain and interpret execution plans as well as assess whether they are inefficient.
• Apply SQL tuning techniques such as hints, SQL profiles, stored outlines and SQL plan baselines.
• Minimize the impact of parsing without jeopardizing performance.
• Optimize data access, joins and the physical design.
• Improve performance through parallel processing, materialized views, and result caching.

This book is intended for performance analysts, application developers and database administrators who are involved in troubleshooting performance problems of applications based on the Oracle database engine.
No specific knowledge in optimization is required. However, readers are expected to have a working knowledge of the Oracle database engine and to be proficient with SQL.
 
 

Book: 

Expert One-on-One Oracle (The Expert's Voice)

Author: Thomas Kyte

Publisher: APress (2003)

Binding: Paperback, 1300 pages

 Tom Kyte's first book is packed with lots of Oracle insider knowledge including, among other topics, what the various Oracle server processes and files do, what's happening inside the database during a transaction, and the real meaning of the various options available in Oracle's DML and DDL SQL statements. The likely impact of design decisions on application behaviour and performance is also discussed, particularly where this relates to using, or not using, a database feature.