For the first time, Murali Vallath dissects the mysteries of Real Application Clusters (RAC) in his book Oracle Real Application Clusters to enlighten and educate you on the internals of RAC operations, cache fusion, fusion recovery processes, and the fast reconfiguration of RAC.
Oracle Real Application Clusters takes you through a logical flow from RAC concepts to operations, covering each facet with a fine-tooth comb. New and experienced users of RAC, as well as those seeking to expand their knowledge of this dynamic technology, will find this book to be a necessity for both home and office reference libraries.
Vallath provides comprehensive coverage of the features, technology, and principles of RAC that is part of the Oracle9i, 9iR2 and 10G release of Oracle's RDBMS product. It is divided into three main parts: application/database design, development, and maintenance life cycles. Compared to its predecessor OPS, the architecture behind RAC implementation has changed significantly. Vallath discusses the various features in a RAC implementation with respect to usage and design considerations, as well as those parameters that are and are not applicable. Areas covered include partitioning, indexes, tablespace management, transaction management, backup, and recovery principles. Performance tuning with examples, troubleshooting, and problem solving scenarios are covered in detail, as well as discussions on the migration process from a single instance database to RAC and migration from an OPS implementation to RAC.
Scripts included in this book can be downloaded at www.summersky.biz.
Features coverage of:
· Administration including trouble shooting of RAC
· Configuration of Transparent Application Failover (TAF), using JDBC thick and thin clients
· Configuration of Oracle Net Services etc.
· Tools used for tuning a RAC configuration
· Oracle"s wait interface, including waits specific to a RAC instance and its practical application.
· Using Oracle"s event interface to tune complex SQL queries
· Extensive coverage of usage, day-to-day functions and operations
· Tips and techniques such as script samples to illustrate various features of RAC
· Comparisons with Oracle parallel server
· Discussions on implementing RAC on various operating systems
· Analyzing using Oracle dumps
· Functions of GCS and GES services with respect to transaction management and transaction recovery
· Internals of RAC architecture
Murali Vallath has over 17 years of information technology experience. He specializes in implementation, configuration and performance tuning of Oracle parallel server/Oracle real application clusters. He has numerous RAC implementations to his credit. He is a regular contributor to the Oracle-L list server and is a regular speaker at various national and international conferences on Oracle parallel server/Oracle real application cluster and performance tuning topics. Vallath can be reached at murali.vallath@summersky.biz or muralivallath@hotmail.com.
Books.Elsevier.com/digitalpress/
Audience: Oracle developers, Database Administrators, Performance Analysts, System and Database Architects.
Anonymous
Posted Wed Dec 03 00:00:00 EST 2003
I found this book to be really useful. It covers RAC from A-Z. RAC is a composition of many single instances. Which means a RAC book should contain the right amount of internals covering a single instance and in combination with the clustering pieces makes it complete. I highly recommend this book.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted Sun Nov 16 00:00:00 EST 2003
One of the superb referance book on subject of Clustering technologies (a-z) for oracle . Writer has amazing grip on explaining very technical details in logical, simplistic and rational way. I would say this is a one stop clustering book which preety much covers all nitty gritty of Oracle clustering. This would be a library book for lots of good dba(s).
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted Sun Dec 14 00:00:00 EST 2003
This is an excellent book on RAC, the author has explained all required details starting with principles of clustering, architecture, internals of cache fusion, best practices and in depth coverage on performance tuning. This is a great book.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted Sun Dec 14 00:00:00 EST 2003
The book covers a great detail of Oracle technology. Having worked with RAC since its first release. I think the author has taken great efforts to start with the basic concepts and drive from the basic Oracle concepts into the clustering technology to make it a complete comprehensive book. I wish I had this book when I first started into RAC, don't get me wrong even after 3 years of working with RAC I find this book very useful. Here is a recap for the benefit of other readers. Chapter 2 covers the various hardware technologies available, the SMP architecture, SMP clustering, storage subsystems and the various types of cluster interconnects. A good comprehensive coverage of the hardware concepts on what is there and what to look forward to in areas of high speed interconnects. Chapter 3 covers Oracle concepts. I think this was a good presentation of Oracle technology especially because RAC is nothing but a combination of many single instances. This is probably the only chapter that is exclusively dedicated to Oracle single instance concepts. In this chapter the author has analyzed Oracle file and memory dumps to explain the concepts. Chapter 4 covers the RAC architecture, pretty detailed in-depth coverage, starting with the lock structures in RAC with the various background and foreground processes are covered in detail. Detailed discussion on the functions of GRD, GCS and GES, which are the backbones in a RAC architecture Chapter 5 covers transaction management and behavior. The author has explained in detail the various transaction scenarios not neglecting the fact on how transitions are managed in a single instance configuration and covering areas that any developer/administrator should keep watch for when writing SQL statements to perform. This chapter has a great detail of fine tooth analysis. Chapter 6 covers parallel processing. This is the only chapter that I wish the author had provided more details. I wish he had provided some more in-depth details into parallel processing across instances without sacrificing details of parallel processing within an instance. Chapter 7 covers design considerations for RAC. The chapter discusses various database features that should be considered while designing for RAC not to mention that these features with the RAC technology will provide higher scalability. Apart from the index considerations, partitioning options the new sorted hash cluster feature coming in 10g has also been discussed. Chapter 8 Installation and configuration, the chapter was very helpful. I was able to give this book to a Junior DBA and based on the information contained in this chapter and Chapter 16 he was able to get a step by step jumpstart into the installation and configuration of RAC. The great thing about the entire book is its written in simple readable English Chapter 10 Availability and Scalability. It is an outstanding chapter. Provides details on how Oracle fails over, the various steps are analyzed and explained. These explanations are followed by various examples of the tnsnames configuration, usage of JDBC thick and thin drivers including detailed JAVA code that was helpful to the development team. Chapter 12. Backup and recovery, the most important thing about this chapter that I found useful was the details covered in the recovery scenarios from various types of failures in a RAC environment. All scenarios are explained using trace file outputs and flow charts. Chapter 13, 14 and 15 cover performance tuning. These chapters cover tools, utilities, tuning a single instance and tuning the clustered database. The author is rightly stated that tuning a RAC environment starts with tuning a single instance, I can relate back to our experience when installing and configuring RAC. I benefited from the enormous amount of scripts and data that the author has used to explain the wait interface and events interface available from Oracle. I wish a CD or disk was included. While some of th
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.
Overview
"The latest versions of Oracle®, 9i RAC and 10g, both include important features in the area of performance optimization and high availability. The new features can be daunting if you don"t have experts in house, and having the right roadmap to help you through these new features is critical. This book does an excellent job at recognizing the setup, migration, and performance challenges every company will face, and will help your company optimize instance efficiency in your production database environment. ...