Rating: 
Summary: Must own for anyone working with Oracle
Review: Absolutely the best book I've ever read on any technical subject. The book is very easy to read and the examples are excellent and relevant to real world situations.
Rating:
Summary: Building high-performance, scalable Oracle applications
Review: Effective Oracle By Design by Oracle guru Tom Kyte ("Ask Tom" column in Oracle magazine) is the definitive guide to designing and building high-performance, scalable Oracle applications. Providing detailed code examples throughout, Tom Kyte teaches proactive and efficient methods to develop and tune Oracle applications that fully exploit the database. He also shows how to maximize the built-in functionality of tools in order to achieve the best results possible.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent but Tom's first book a lot better
Review: I have both of Tom's book and while this one is quite good, the first one the major book called Oracle One on One is pure solid gold for dbas and developers serious about Oracle! I have taken all of the Oracle DBA courses and have several years of DBA experience but still learned a ton of stuff that was missing such as partitioning, application tuning and design and general Oracle knowledge. Tom is a major deity when it comes to Oracle wisdom and his writing style rocks.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Oracle design book
Review: If you've ever looked over anything about the Oracle database, you've likely come across the name of this book's author, Tom Kyte. Like his articles, this book is designed to help the reader get the most out of the Oracle database. This is an excellent book for understanding the inner workings of Oracle database engine.The theme of this book is that by understanding how Oracle works, you can write highly scalable, high performing applications. If you don't know how your database works, you'll always be frustrated and less likely to have a well-performing database. The author is absolutely serious about this point and drives it home by dispelling many myths surrounding Oracle (e.g. partitioning is always better than not partitioning). By discussing these technical details, the reader is equipped with the knowledge to build an application designed to perform. If you're looking for a book to learn how to write effective PL/SQL, then you might be slightly disappointed by this book. While there is a great chapter on the Oracle specifics of writing SQL, this book is designed to architecting the entire database, not just the SQL statements run inside the database. I think this a very effective (and sadly novel) approach to database design. There are all too many books out there which concentrate on writing fast SQL, with little regard for the underlying data design and structure. This is by far the best book I have read on understanding how Oracle works. The author covers everything from design to disaster recovery. If you are responsible for maintaining an Oracle database, I would highly recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Oracle design book
Review: If you've ever looked over anything about the Oracle database, you've likely come across the name of this book's author, Tom Kyte. Like his articles, this book is designed to help the reader get the most out of the Oracle database. This is an excellent book for understanding the inner workings of Oracle database engine. The theme of this book is that by understanding how Oracle works, you can write highly scalable, high performing applications. If you don't know how your database works, you'll always be frustrated and less likely to have a well-performing database. The author is absolutely serious about this point and drives it home by dispelling many myths surrounding Oracle (e.g. partitioning is always better than not partitioning). By discussing these technical details, the reader is equipped with the knowledge to build an application designed to perform. If you're looking for a book to learn how to write effective PL/SQL, then you might be slightly disappointed by this book. While there is a great chapter on the Oracle specifics of writing SQL, this book is designed to architecting the entire database, not just the SQL statements run inside the database. I think this a very effective (and sadly novel) approach to database design. There are all too many books out there which concentrate on writing fast SQL, with little regard for the underlying data design and structure. This is by far the best book I have read on understanding how Oracle works. The author covers everything from design to disaster recovery. If you are responsible for maintaining an Oracle database, I would highly recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: Another masterpiece from Thomas Kyte
Review: The previous work by the same author, "Expert one-on-one: Oracle", got an average of 5/5 stars and more than 50 reviews, which is of course an outstanding result for any book, but especially for books about Oracle, which aren't normally so well-received by the readers community (to say the least). Well, I'm sure that this book is going to get the same success. Thomas Kyte is well known for being an excellent writer, and in fact the material is presented here in a clear, concise yet complete manner, and it's very easy to follow the discussion and reproduce the examples.
The examples themselves are one of the greatest strengths of this book, because they illustrate, and prove, the topics discussed (and so what is written is *reliable*, which is of course a fundamental property for any technical book, but a quality seldom found in other Oracle tomes). At the same time, the examples (written mostly in SQL and PL/SQL) teach you a lot about how to code appropriately (the Author being a well-known SQL guru), showing e.g. syntactic variations, useful Oracle-supplied packages, new Oracle extensions ... I strongly believe that in order to be a good developer you must be exposed to high quality code, and reading this book is an excellent way to achieve this (well, I learnt more about SQL and PL/SQL from Thomas Kyte's books than from other books dedicated exclusively to SQL and PL/SQL programming). The book is also magic - it can read your mind. Yes, I had in store a couple of non-trivial questions to be asked on asktom.oracle.com, and I found the answers in the book! Well, this magic property comes straight from the Author's experience in answering thousands of technical question on his aforementioned web site, asked by Oracle developers and DBAs all around the world - so it's not surprising that the book is tuned with what people think, and need to know, about Oracle. I would say that this is a feature present only in Thomas Kyte's books, since there is simply no other place like asktom. To sum up - this book and "Expert one-on-one: Oracle" are overall the best books about Oracle I've read, and I own more than 15 of them. I can't remember all the times that I've used the latter book in my work as an Oracle specialist, and I've already used a lot of things learnt from this book as well. I absolutely recommend both this and "Expert one-on-one: Oracle".
Rating:
Summary: Great book
Review: This book is a must-have if you work with Oracle for a living. In my day job I work with Oracle and MS SQL. This book makes working with Oracle almost as easy as working with MS. It will teach you how to analyse your system for things that indicate problems and resolve them before they kick you in the behind.
Rating:
Summary: Great book
Review: This book is great. Author is unsurpassed in his ablility to explain how to use Oracle DB. Every time he makes a point he always back it up with clear and easy to follow steps to prove that point. Absolutely a great book.
Rating:
Summary: A must read for DBAs
Review: This is one of the best Oracle books I've ever read. The style is different from any book I've ever read. Most of the Oracle books are feature centric, while this (as the name implies) is more design centric. In addition to design, it is interesting to see his methodology for proving his assertions. So many times in my career, I've been asked questions about design, and I've had a hard time articiluating why it should be done one way and not another. Typically the alternative is so bizzare, I've never even considered why other than "its just not right". His explainations to the "make everything varchar2(4000)" and the "have the application do all the validations" scenarios made me laugh out loud. The ETL developer on one of my projects wanted to take that exact approach. I've also never read a book that went into such detail about the Cost Based Optimizer, which was very interesting.
Can't wait to get my hands on "one-on-one", I hope it's more of the same.
Rating:
Summary: A great book from a great author!
Review: Tom Kyte has proven again(Not that he needs to!), that the most important thing about writing is to get total 100% attention of the audience. He does it very well. The book is excellently written with examples and for advanced oracle users(dba/developers) it's a treat. Tarry
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