February 17, 2012
As I mentioned in a previous blog article, I placed an order for the book “Oracle Database 11gR2 Performance Tuning Cookbook“, mostly because I was curious how the book would compare with the “Oracle Database 11g Performance Tuning Recipes” book (my review of that book was a total of about 35 typewritten pages in length), and some of the other Oracle performance related books that I have reviewed.
After placing my order for the book, I took a quick look at a couple of the book’s preview pages on Amazon, downloaded the sample chapter from the book publisher - chapter 10 “Tuning I/O”, and spent a bit of time reading the sample chapter (making comments in the margins of the printed pages). I circled the following paragraph (sorry for the long quote – I want to make certain that the context of the quote is not lost), found on page 422 of the book (page 17 in the PDF download):
“We can also distribute tables and related indexes on different disks, to obtain performance gain in both read and write operations. If we have tables and indexes on the same disk, we need to read and write in two different places on the same disk. By dividing the work between two disks, we can perform an index range scan faster than when the index and the table are on the same disk.”
What, if anything, is wrong with the above quote from the book? For some reason, the acronym MASE came to mind when I read the above paragraph.
The point of blog articles like this one is not to insult authors who have spent thousands of hours carefully constructing an accurate and helpful book, but instead to suggest that readers investigate when something stated does not exactly match what one believes to be true. It could be that the author “took a long walk down a short pier”, or that the author is revealing accurate information which simply cannot be found through other resources (and may in the process be directly contradicting information sources you have used in the past). If you do not investigate in such cases, you may lose an important opportunity to learn something that could prove to be extremely valuable.