Detailed Book Review: Oracle 8 and Windows NT Black Book

Oracle 8 & Windows NT Black Book
by Mike Curtis, Jacqueline King

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Oracle 8 & Windows NT Black Book
Mike Curtis, Jacqueline King
Coriolis Group Books
1-57610-248-3
CD-ROM

This is one of the first books I read which deals with running an Oracle8 database on a Windows NT platform. Every chapter in the book is divided into two sections. The first section gives you a theoretical description of a given topic (e.g. how to set up account security), whereas the second section gives a practical guide, with real life examples, on how to accomplish these tasks. This makes the book useful as a reference book.

The book is divided into three parts, namely: 1) Getting started with Oracle on NT 2) New features of Oracle8 3) Administering Oracle8 with the Oracle Enterprise Manager

The first part of the book was quite good. It first gives an explanation of the architecture of the Oracle database and then continues with a step by step explanation of how to install an Oracle8 database on a Windows NT platform. It also gives you a good understanding about the differences in administering a database on Windows NT as opposed to e.g. Unix, and shows you all the potential security leaks, and pitfalls in administering the database.
The second part of the book is useful if you are planning on using the new features in the Oracle8 database. It was nice to read about these new features, but since most of them pertain to a very large database environment, they were only interesting as background information for me. One criticism regarding this part of the book though is that it contained quite a number of typing errors. The ones in the examples were especially annoying.
The last part of the book deals with administering the database with the Oracle Enterprise Manager. This chapter again was quite interesting as it showed how to do common DBA tasks using the OEM.

All in all I would recommend this book to starting DBA's as a good starters book to get a better understanding about how to administer an Oracle8 database on a Windows NT platform. For experienced Unix DBA's, it might be interesting to read the chapters regarding the differences between Unix and NT. If you are an experienced Windows NT DBA, this book could be useful as a reference manual, but I think that there are better books on the market for that purpose.

Finally, the book also contains a CD-Rom with demo versions of a couple of database administration tools, and diagnostic tools, such as BMC Patrol Database, Platinum SQL Station, and Savant Q-Diagnostic.

(Arjan Jansen)

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