Oracle Applications DBA Field Guide

Administrators and managers as well as more advanced users will find plenty of hard facts for administering Oracle Applications in a work environment, but it's also quite portable and not the weighty tome you'd expect from such a survey.

? Midwest Book Review, California Bookwatch

Oracle Applications DBA Field Guide provides scripts, notes, guidelines, and references to guide you safely through the crucial day-to-day administration tasks that fall within your jurisdiction. This includes configuring, monitoring, performance tuning, troubleshooting, and patching. This book contains tips, techniques, and guidance for administering the highly complex Oracle E-Business Suite running Oracle9i or Oracle10g on UNIX or Linux serversall in an easy reading and quick-to-navigate format.

Even for the experienced database administrator, Oracle Applications are complicated to administer, and most other documentation out there is difficult to find and understand. Whether you're an experienced Oracle Applications DBA or a relative newcomer to Oracle 11i Applications (perhaps migrating from PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, or Siebel), this book will enable you to make a real impact on the ease and efficiency of your day-to-day administrative tasks, and will be relevant for Oracle Applications Release 12 and Fusion.

User review
Good For Novice Oracle Application DBAs but be careful
This book provides a good overview of the architecture and components or Oracle e-Business Suite. I would be very useful for novice Oracle Application DBAs. However, I have found that there are at least a couple of the finer points provided in this book that are misstated or just plain wrong. So don't assume everything you read in this book is 100% accurate.

User review
Covers Oracle Apps basics
I was looking for more indepth information about Oracle apps. This book covers basic information.

User review
Good place to start . . .
I am just getting into Oracle Applications. Traditionally, I always read the Oracle Documentation . . . (RTFM). I bought this book for the purpose of getting a high level view before getting into the Oracle Docs. This book is well laid and reads very easily. The author also points to various Metalink articles which is a nice touch.

User review
Refresher for Experienced Oracle 11i Apps DBA
I liked this book but it is more of a quick refresher to jog memory when I am working in an Oracle 11i Apps environment as an Oracle Apps DBA. I would only recommend it to experienced 11i Apps people because it assumes at least a basic knowledge of how Oracle 11i works. For that much said, I recommend the other two excellent Oracle 11i App DBA books for new Apps DBAs.

User review
A Great nuts & bolts handbook
A lot of folks, when they talk about tech books, start right in with details, correctness, and comments on depth and so on. I'd like to tell you that this book is an enjoyable read. Phelps and Jackson are good writers, and they breakdown concepts and details into an easy to use handbook or `field guide`.

As I move into more Applications implementations, I have found this book to be indispensible for day-to-day answers.

What do I like? The book is organized well, with nice coverage of a diverse suite of software. It offers suggestions like clearing the JAR cache, purging concurrent requests, and workflow history, and so on. What I also really like is it has an excellent chapter on both what to monitor, and complete scripts to do it with. In the database, those include listener, logfiles, db up/down, idle sessions, long running sessions, high active sessions, blocking sessions, tablespace usage, extent issues & profile changes. Also scripts to monitor apache, jvm, forms, concurrent manager, OS cpu & load average are included.

I have a couple of small caveats as well. If you're a real newbie to Oracle Apps + Oracle in general, this is probably not the book for you. Also although there is some coverage of Unix in chapter 6 toolkit, I'd say if you're not strong with Unix already, this chapter won't help much. Also chapter 7 resources, was a bit of a letdown. They mention IOUG, OAUG as organizations, and related conferences, and Oracle's own site and a couple of others, but there are tons of blogs out there, and I would have liked to be pointed to the ones the authors recommend or favor most. Also the book list recommendations are decent, but mostly in the Oracle Database arena, and since I'm already an accomplished DBA, I have all those books! Also the Performance chapter mentions hitratios, which is almost considered taboo in the Oracle world these days, and didn't get into more depth with the Wait Interface and so on.

In summary I really enjoy this book for it's great writing style, quick coverage, best practices, and troubleshooting recommendations. The only thing I'd say as a reservation is, when it comes to more in depth performance tuning of the db, there are other books that can give you a more detail and specifics.

Enjoy!