Book Review: Oracle Essentials, Oracle Database 11g

This book is intended for the widest possible audience of people who will be in contact with an Oracle database. This can be an Oracle DBA in charge of the Oracle database on a day-to-day basis ,the Data center manager in charge of reviewing the yearly contracts, the IT head from the non-database side who wants to have a functional knowledge of Oracle DB, and finally the application developers and end-users.

The topics under discussion start from an introduction to Oracle and take the reader through the instance and database architecture for a basic installation, moving on to advanced topics such as Oracle security, auditing and compliance, Oracle performance and a discussion on Oracle methods for satisfying the ACID test by means of undo segments and redo logs and a very powerful locking mechanism.

Oracle hardware architecture is an eminently practical topic in that it discusses the implementation details for an Oracle database as well as the much publicized grid feature. Some of the 11g features that have been relevantly discussed include the Automatic Memory Management and the possibility for extracting reports from a standby database while redo log is still being applied via the Active Data Guard Option.

The discussion is fairly widespread and a good account for the Oracle database without going into the technical depth. Honestly, this can hardly be expected from a single book. This is an ideal first book for a person wishing to have a knowledge of the much popular database, though by no means should be the last one.