This special signature edition includes a CD that contains a searchable PDF version of the book and a sample chapter from the 10g edition, which was released in fall 2005.

This remains the defining book on the older 8i Oracle database if you are a developer or database administrator who works with Oracle-driven database applications. You will encounter wisdom on designing, developing, and administering these applications from one of the world’s foremost Oracle experts, Thomas Kyte. This book is largely inspired by the thousands of questions that Kyte has answered on his site, asktom.oracle.com.

The book covers every important feature and function of the 8i version of Oracle, and it is unique in the technical depth and insight that it provides on each topic. This book will show you how to expertly program with the database and exploit its feature set effectively. The result: you will build fast, effective, scalable, and secure Oracle applications.

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Kyte starts out giving the foundations for Oracle databases, the architecture, locking schemes, and table and index considerations. He gives a good treatment of the types of tables and indexes that Oracle offers including the appropriate times to use them and the trade-offs to weigh.

Another key topic that he covers is redo and rollback. These features are handled in a unique way in Oracle, and a lack of understanding can lead to inefficient and incorrect databases and applications.

Armed with the foundations, Kyte then takes the reader through performance tuning and optimizing databases. The best advice in this section is that performance cannot be thrown in at the end. The design decisions for a database will determine how it performs and scales. As he says, "There is no fast=true setting in the init parameters."

Then the book tackles some more advanced features, such as autonomous transactions, dynamic sql, and C and Java extensions for stored procedures. Kyte again gives good advice for when these are appropriate over standard PL/SQL stored procedures.

The size of the book can be intimidating at first glance, but it is pleasant to read. Kyte uses a conversational style rather than a lecturing delivery. This book has a lot to offer, and you won't find yourself tired after reading it.

17 of 17 found the following review helpful:

Best Oracle Book Ever!Nov 14, 2001
By Arie Picot
I've been developing Oracle applications for many years and have never found a book more resourceful than Tom's. It is packed full of valuable information and is a must have for anyone working with Oracle. It covers many aspects application development from a variety of languages including C, PL/SQL and Java. Most Oracle books are strictly for reference, this book makes for good reference but also is great reading and covers interesting concepts. Chapter 1 in this book is called "Developing Successful Oracle Applications" and is a must read. I recently found that my long running query was not properly using the index I created. I looked in Tom's book and found the answer to my problem under a section called "Why isn't my Index Getting Used?" What more could you ask for? If you're a beginner, intermediate or advanced programmer, or DBA this book is for you.

16 of 16 found the following review helpful:

A treasure-trove of insights!May 11, 2004
By M. Loftus
This book attempts to cover dozens of subjects, and as such is 1,300 pages in length! Each subject contains gems of insight that had escaped me for some years now. I very much recommend this book if you are going to do any PL/Sql or Java coding. Read a chapter a day and really think about what Tom is saying. If you are really going to write industrial-strength code then you need this book, as Oracle Documentation and Oracle-Press books (I own several) tend to be quite shallow and omit explanations that Tom includes.

If there is a downside, it is that only a few pages are dedicated to any one subject, meaning that while there are many gems, this is not a book to learn the basics from and it does not cover any one subject completely. But then again, I have not seen an Oracle book that does. I wish Tom would write an entire series of books of this quality; I would buy it in a heart-beat!

P.S. Make sure that you get the 2003 version of this book from "APress", as I purchased one from the "New and Used" and got stuck with the 2001 version from "Oracle Press". Apparently Amazon does not require such disclosure.

26 of 29 found the following review helpful:

For Programmers, This is the Best Oracle Book Ever.Jul 10, 2001
By P. H PICOT
If you are an Oracle programmer, or a DBA that works with programmers (and has to tell them all the things that they are supposed to know), this the best book you can buy. There are books by people that can program, and books by writers who can write but don't quite understand what they are writing about and there are a million other faults a book could have, but this book has none of them. Tom Kyte is at the very top of Oracle programming and he is a teacher who wants you to be able the do the same thing. Every topic in this book "reaches the ground". Tom starts from setting up your environment, and takes you through many high level exercises, showing you how to make it work, every single step of the way. He is teacher like W. Richard Stevens and Steve Rago.

There is too much to describe it all but as an example, there is a 70 page section on writing a C-Based external procedure. It starts with six pages of setting up your environment (listener, schema, server, exproc program, libraries), then the code in PL/SQL and C, how to make it, how to install it, how to test it, and ends with the answer to every error message you might get if you make a mistake.

The applications discussed are not just "interesting" and they don't just "work". There is a recurring theme in all of the applications and that is this: they scale. Tom has sections on bind variable, and then more on bind variables, and then more on bind variables, until the idea is branded on you that a "working" application is trivial unless it scales. You aren't writing code for developers, but for end users who may do millions of transactions a day; that is the kind of code you want.

If you already know everything, you will learn more, but either way Tom's projects are complete, and well documented; you can learn this.

This is great book, you will read all 1200 pages.

14 of 14 found the following review helpful:

From a developer's perspective: strongly recommendedDec 08, 2002
By O
As I mention in the title, I rate this book from a developer's perspective not a DBA's: My Oracle experience is usually Java/J2EE/JDBC and little PL/SQL programming.

When I first saw this book, I thought it to be a DBA reference book. Then I started picking up chapters and reading: I was amazed with the quality of information and suprised how blindly I before was working with the Oracle database. Why my query was so slow? why my index didn't help? Why transaction isolation level was so critical? and so on. I found answers to my questions in this book.

In this book, Tom explains internals of Oracle database, detailing and emphasizing critical points, and helping us to understand how we can use the Oracle database correctly and efficiently. Topics range from DBA topics like configuration, data loading, partioning to those which programmers can benefit as well: Optimization, indexes, transactions, tables etc.

This book is not a book about SQL, database design or database theory. It's all about getting the best out of an Oracle database. I strongly recommend it to any programmer developing software interacting with an Oracle database. SQL, general database knowledge, and basic Oracle knowledge is almost mandatory for reading (One should know what trigger, view, transaction, schema, index etc. are before starting the book).

With this book, "Expert One on One" series of Wrox seems to make a very good start.

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