Rating: 
Summary: Best Oracle book since Tom Kyte's
Review: When a medical study discovers that the preliminary results are so positive that it is saving a lot of patients' lives the researchers will stop the study to publish preliminary results and get the word out. I haven't finished reading this book. In fact I just got it last week and am only about 100 pages into it. But already I am convinced that this is the best Oracle book in recent memory. It is well written and extremely informative. The format steps a beginner through step by step, and along the way shows the intermediate and advanced Oracle DBA some very important fine points. The title is a bit deceptive, in that although it certainly is a performance book, the approach is to build the RDBMS application from the ground up with good performance as the ultimate goal. This is the right way to go about getting good performance, as opposed to the crisis management approach applied to legacy systems after the fact. Most legacy applications that performance tuning experts see in the field have a hideous design created by people who no longer work with or for the company and, judging by the implementation, are currently in hiding, hoping that no one can trace the code to them. But if someone were to set up their database by using this book, step by step, it would be a pleasure to tune, though it probably wouldn't need it. There is a great chapter on Data Guard (standby database), and a lot of material that is obviously drawn from years of hands-on day-to-day work with the Oracle RDBMS 'in the trenches.' In short, buy this book, it's worth the money.
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