Editorial Review
What makes seasoned IT professionals run for cover? Answer: Forecasting Oracle performance! Craig Shallahamer is an Oracle performance expert with over 18 years of experience. His book is the first to focus, not on the problem of solving today's problem, but squarely on the problem of forecasting the future performance of an Oracle database. Other Oracle performance books are good for putting out fires; Craig's book helps you avoid all the heat in the first place.
Application over mathematical proofs…
If you’re an IT practioner who appreciates application over mathematical proofs than you’ll be pleasantly surprised! Each chapter is filled with examples to transform the theory, mathematics, and methods into something you can practically apply. Craig's goal is to teach you about real-word Oracle performance forecasting. Period. There is no hidden agenda.
A practical and hands-on training course in a book…
This book is a kind of training course. After reading, studying, and practicing the material covered in this book, you to be able to confidently, responsibly, and professionally forecast performance and system capacity in a wide variety of real-life situations.
How to avoid being on the Wall Street Journal’s front page…
If you are more management minded (or want to be) you will be delighted with the service level management focus. Forecasting makes good business sense because it maximizes the return on IT investment and minimizes unplanned down time. To those who think forecasting is a waste of money. Well…obviously they’ve never been on the evening news because their company lost millions of dollars in revenue and brand destruction because of poorly performing or unavailable systems.
It’s about equipping you…
Without a doubt you will be equipped to deal with the realities of forecasting Oracle performance. But this book gives you more. Not only will you receive a technical and mathematical perspective, but also a communication, a presentation, and a management perspective. This is career building stuff and immensely satisfying!
What you’ll learn
This book is a “how to” book filled with examples to transform theory and mathematics into something you can practically apply. You will learn how to use a variety of forecasting models, which will enable you to methodically:
- Help manage service levels from a business value perspective,
- Identify the risk of over utilized resources,
- Predict what component of an architecture is at risk,
- Predict when a system will be at risk,
- Develop multiple risk mitigating strategies to ensure service levels are
- maintained
- Characterize a complex Oracle workload.
Who is this book for?
I.T. professionals who must ensure their production Oracle systems are meeting service levels, in part, through forecasting performance, identifying risk, and developing solutions to ensure systems are available without wasting budget. Readers include database administrators, I.T. managers, developers, capacity planners, systems architects, systems integrators.
Cached date: AWS Called=true
Customer Reviews
Very good 
2008-05-24
This is not a book about Oracle Performance tuning. This is a book about Oracle Performance Forecasting. This should be evident after carefully reading the book.
Good books, like good professionals, are rare. This is why I have developed a tendency to choose carefully before buying one and, in the Oracle area in particular, I can smell the author's intellectual honesty and trustworthiness from the first page.
Forecasting Oracle Performance is one of those. I enjoyed the fluid style and closeness of the author. I enjoyed the simplicity and clarity, almost reminding me of Wittgenstein's famous quote ("everything that can be said can be said clearly"). I also enjoyed these short touches of humanism (cf Erlang Krarup's life).
On the forecasting subject, I liked the book construction and the quality of the examples.
Chapter 1 gives a landscape picture of Oracle forecasting and puts the reader in scope and context.
Chapter 2 introduces the reader to the basics of forecasting and the basic concepts over which the book is built: Transactions, response time, arrival time and basic formulas are described here.
Chapter 3 shows the limits of basic forecasting (essential formulas) and the problem of baseline and model selection. It shows how to increase forecasting precision with ErlangC or weighted averages. Most importantly, it shows why it is essential to understand the concepts and implications of the application of a given formula, model or method. The author is very careful in the choice of terms and always clears potential ambiguities. Those who know how difficult it can be to forecast will appreciate it.
Chapter 4 introduces to statistics applied to forecasting.
Chapter 5, on practical queuing theory, is probably the biggest chapter of the book. After a brief introduction to queuing theory, Little's law and Kendall notation, this chapter provides such a diverse set of examples (27!) making the topic very intuitive to non-specialists.
Chapters 6 & 7 describe forecasting methodology and workload characterization. The first describes the steps across a solid performance forecasting methodology, from the initial question to the actual forecast. The second deals with workload characterization: how to get system and Oracle data, how to choose the source and peak. It describes the workload modelling and the risks of data collection.
Chapters 8 and 9 are about models: ratio and linear regression models. They describe their respective foundations, limitations and advantages. Each chapter also contain several examples and case studies to illustrate the subject.
The last chapter deals with scalability models and their relationship with forecasting models.
Overall, I found this book very useful. You will find additional resources at the author's website (there is also a discussion forum on forecasting). The errata page is always up-to-date and some examples have even been extended. Great work!
Outstanding coverage of an important topic 2008-01-16
I've always been a fan of Craig Shallahamer, an author who explains complex concepts in plain English.
This is not a trivial book, but it's an excellent book for performance tuning, a worthy book for the worthy scholar.
Oracle STATSPACK and the automated workload repository have provided a gold mine for the Oracle DBA to forecast future performance, and this is a great "get started" book to the statistical techniques that are required to perform performance forecasting.
Not a tunning book 2007-09-24
This is a great book to do FORECASTING, that is, if you already have a tunning problem you will not find the solution here. If you are in calm times regarding your application speed, this is when you have to do Performance Forecasting, for which this book is excelent. Very practical and just enough technicall to grasp the priciples.
