Rating: 
Summary: Absolute essential for any Oracle developer/DBA
Review: This book has it all. I cannot recommend it highly enough. I can only hope that there are similar books available if my work ever shifts to competing databases. After 3 years of working with Oracle 7, I've only amassed about 1% of the practical knowledge and insights that Mr. Harrison shares with us in this book. Like the title suggests, it teaches Oracle database and SQL statement performance tuning rules, strategies and tips. However, it also dips into other valuable topics like principles of indexing, explaining the ever-mysterious tkprof output, configuring and tuning the database server itself, and listing other resources to fill the void of Oracle documentation. This book and Fuerstein's PL/SQL programming book have become standard issue for all developers on our project.
Rating: 
Summary: Automate SQL Tunning
Review: This book is good for all Oracle Developer who write SQL statement. If developer who write SQL statement will read through this book before, there will be no performance problem.However, I know that most of the developers will not care about the performance of the SQL statement. They may find that their SQL statement will execute very fast in testing environment because the number of records there is 1/10 time of the production, they need to do is to deliver the programs on time and the output of the program is corrected. Performance issue is not their major concern. After the completion of the program development, a big problem relating to performance issue will be unveiled in load test or volume test, much more effort and money will be spent in performance tunning because of bad SQL statements. I am a project manager of a system integration company, I really want that a automatic SQL tunning package is in the world which can help us to scan through all the source codes and find out the problematic SQL statements and give us the alternative SQL statements with better performance.
Rating:
Summary: Automate SQL Tunning
Review: This book is good for all Oracle Developer who write SQL statement. If developer who write SQL statement will read through this book before, there will be no performance problem.However, I know that most of the developers will not care about the performance of the SQL statement. They may find that their SQL statement will execute very fast in testing environment because the number of records there is 1/10 time of the production, they need to do is to deliver the programs on time and the output of the program is corrected. Performance issue is not their major concern. After the completion of the program development, a big problem relating to performance issue will be unveiled in load test or volume test, much more effort and money will be spent in performance tunning because of bad SQL statements. I am a project manager of a system integration company, I really want that a automatic SQL tunning package is in the world which can help us to scan through all the source codes and find out the problematic SQL statements and give us the alternative SQL statements with better performance.
Rating:
Summary: My #1 favorite Oracle tuning book!
Review: This book is vastly superior to 99% of other purported tuning books. This book has saved me huge amounts of time, and assisted me in solving numerous performance problems, with great benefit to myself and my clients. True - there appear to be some minor syntax errors; this only proves that Mr. Harrison is human. I seriously question the credibility of anyone who would call this book not useful. That is simply not a believable statement.
Rating:
Summary: wait for the next release
Review: This is a MUST HAVE book if you're writing lots of SQL (in Oracle) and need to make sure it is as efficient as possible. Lots of real-world examples, with side-by-side comparisons of different queries that all produce the same result via different methods. It is easy to apply these techniques in my work. I have six books from Oracle Press, and while they are good as reference material, I find myself using them basically for syntax or server tuning, and never for PL/SQL tuning. Guy Harrison's book is a permanent fixture on my desk; this book covers table access methods, how to avoid unnecessary table scans, how to use TKPROF (with some excellent ratios and things to look for in the output), etc. The list goes on. I would strongly recommend this to anyone who writes SQL (in Oracle) on a daily basis.
Rating:
Summary: Hands-down, the best resource I have for tuning Oracle SQL
Review: This is a MUST HAVE book if you're writing lots of SQL (in Oracle) and need to make sure it is as efficient as possible. Lots of real-world examples, with side-by-side comparisons of different queries that all produce the same result via different methods. It is easy to apply these techniques in my work. I have six books from Oracle Press, and while they are good as reference material, I find myself using them basically for syntax or server tuning, and never for PL/SQL tuning. Guy Harrison's book is a permanent fixture on my desk; this book covers table access methods, how to avoid unnecessary table scans, how to use TKPROF (with some excellent ratios and things to look for in the output), etc. The list goes on. I would strongly recommend this to anyone who writes SQL (in Oracle) on a daily basis.
Rating:
Summary: Got me out of a jam
Review: Turned right to the page I needed and got started on the solution. What out-dated material? Did they move the SGA? Are we not using SQL anymore? This is an outstanding book by an author with actual experience in the field who's taken the time to produce extensive examples. Not just the trivial examples for syntax diagrams, Mr. Harrison demonstrates the discipline required of tuning, performance testing, data gathering and analysis. My copy has pages 59-61 and is just about error-free. I suppose it may be possible that the word "select" may have been mis-spelled somewhere, but if you get stuck on that, you've probably got bigger problems that need to be dealt with before buying this book. Who is it that writes those negative reviews; a competitive author or just someone with a brain-fart? It skews the results unfairly. Shouldn't stand-out books like these have something more relevant than just a blank value judgement? It was a real jaw-dropper to see "unuseful" in a review about this book after having landed a contract to implement one of the techniques straight off the page. If you get nothing else out of this book, know that tuning SQL will give you orders of magnitude improvement in performance, while fiddle-farting with the init.ora will get you a percentage, in other words, not even a factor. Which would you rather have...10% or 10 times? I do have one complaint...the new cover is too gaudy, if not down-right garish. But then, I bought it for the content, not the cover.
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