Want to Know More about Oracle’s Core?

I had a real treat this summer during my “time off” in that I got to review Jonathan Lewis’s up-coming new book. I think it’s going to be a great book. If you want to know how Oracle actually holds it’s data in memory, how it finds records already in the cache and how it manages to control everything so that all that committing and read consistency really works, it will be the book for you.

{Update, Jonathan has confirmed that, unexpected hiccups aside, Oracle Core: Essential Internals for DBAs and Developers should be available from October 24, 2011}

{Thanks to Mike Cox, who let me know it is already available to be reserved at Amazon}

Jonathan got in touch with me around mid-May to say he was working on the draft of his new book, one that would cover “how does Oracle work”, the core mechanics. Would I be willing to be one of his reviewers? Before anyone comments that there is not likely to be much about core Oracle that I know and Jonathan does not, he did point out that he had already lined up someone to be his technical reviewer, ie someone he expected to know as much as he and help spot actual errors. The technical reviewer is the most excellent Tanel Poder, who posted a little mention of it a couple of months back.

I was to act more like a typical reader – someone who knew the basics and wanted to learn more. I would be more likely to spot things he had assumed we all know but don’t, or bits that did not clearly explain the point if you did not already know the answer. ie an incomplete geek. I figured I could manage that :-).

It was a lot harder work than I expected and I have to confess I struggled to supply back feedback as quickly as Jonathan wanted it – I was not working but I was very busy {and he maybe did not poke me with a sharp stick for feedback soon enough}. As anybody who has had to review code specifications or design documents will probably appreciate, you don’t just read stuff when you review it, you try and consider if all the information is there, can it be misunderstood and, if you find that you don’t understand a section, you need to work out if the fault is with you, with the way it is written or with what is written. When I read a technical {or scientific} document and I do not fully understand it, I usually leave it a day, re-read it and if it still seems opaque, I just move on. In this case I could not do that, I had to ensure I understood it or else tell Jonathan why I thought I did not understand it. If there are sections in the end book that people find confusing, I’ll feel I let Jonathan down.

Just as tricky, on the one hand, as I’ve been using Oracle for so long and I do know quite a lot about Oracle {although clearly not enough in the eyes of the author 🙂 } I had to try and “not know” stuff to be able to decide if something was missing. On the other, when I wanted to know more about something was I just being a bit too nerdy? I swung more towards the opinion that if I wanted to know more, others would too.

I have to say that I really enjoyed the experience and I learnt a lot. I think it might change how I read technical books a little. I would run through each chapter once to get the feel of it all and then re-read it properly, constantly checking things in both version 11 and 10 of Oracle as I read the drafts and would not let myself skip over anything until I felt I really understood it. As an example, I’ve never dug into internal locks, latches and mutexes much before and now that I’ve had to learn more to review the book, I have a much better appreciation of some issues I’ve seen in the wild.

Keep an eye out for the book, it should be available by the end of this year and be called something like “Oracle Core” {I’ll check with Jonathan and update this}. I won’t say it will be an easy read – though hopefully a little easier as a result of my input – as understanding things always takes some skull work. But it will certainly be a rewarding read and packed full of information and knowledge.