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New PL/SQL book: Oracle PL/SQL Performance Tuning Tips & Techniques

I recently received a copy of Michael Rosenblum's and Dr. Paul Dorsey's latest book: Oracle PL/SQL Performance Tuning Tips & Techniques. Very impressive!

It's so different from mine: only 300 pages compared to my monster tome of 1000+ pages. Ah, so much easier to hold.

But way more importantly, it is packed full of performance advice, based on the deep, long experiences of two Oracle technologists who have been out in the trenches helping customers put together successful applications that fully leverage Oracle Database and all is core technologies.

There are an awful lot of books on PL/SQL in the market; many of them (inevitably) cover the same material, albeit in different ways.

I found this book to be a very refreshing addition to the mix. It takes a holistic approach, offering glimpses into aspects of Oracle Database architecture and tuning/analysis tools with which most PL/SQL developers are not terribly familiar.

It uncovers some delightful nuggets, such as improving the deterministic caching of user-defined function calls in SQL by placing that function call in a scalar subquery (page 191).

I plan to apply a number of their ideas to the PL/SQL Challenge backend; I also expect to be modifying some of my training materials to reflect their experience in some feature areas for which I am mostly an "academic" presenter. That makes it a book definitely worth having on my bookshelf, and one I can certainly recommend to others!

Of course, no book is perfect. I feel that Oracle PL/SQL Performance Tuning Tips & Techniques could benefit from a clearer statement of use cases for a number of features, such as FORALL and the Function Result Cache. Certainly, many readers will be experienced developers and so perhaps don't need that framing, but be optimistic, fellows! Expect that many readers will be relatively inexperienced developers trying to figure out how to improve their code's performance.

Bottom Line:

If you write PL/SQL or are responsible for tuning the PL/SQL code written by someone else, this book will give you a broader, deeper set of tools with which to achieve PL/SQL success.

Comments

  1. AnonymousOctober 8, 2014 at 2:52 AM

    I read your comment on the book, but i guess this book is for advanced performance tuning, do you have any recommendation for new bee like me :), may be this for next level .

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousOctober 8, 2014 at 2:54 AM

    I read your comment on the book, but i guess this book is for advanced performance tuning, do you have any recommendation for new bee like me :), may be this for next level .

    ReplyDelete
  3. Steven FeuersteinOctober 8, 2014 at 6:54 AM

    Yes, you are right - this is for someone with solid experience in Oracle. Well, the good news about PL/SQL is that really is a pretty easy language to learn. You could check out PL/SQL for Dummies or PL/SQL 101 - or just go straight for my big fat Oracle PL/SQL Programming book - it's not REDSIGNED for beginners, but I think it is a pretty accessible and comprehensive text.

    ReplyDelete
  4. AnonymousOctober 9, 2014 at 11:16 AM

    Thanks a lot steven, will check that out.

    ReplyDelete

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