Oracle Shell Scripting: an “Excellent presentation”

Well, things have been busy for me (hence the break from blogging) but interest in my Oracle Shell Scripting book remains strong! Just today this (5 star) review showed up on Amazon from Srinivas Gaddam:

Excellent presentation
If you are working on Oracle products, you know problems can get complex and the internet will have million possible solutions, but if you are looking for just one that works you should own this book.

Thanks a lot Srinivas! This comment hits on one of the reasons I wrote the book: to give a coherent but concise treatment of shell scripting for Oracle while giving plenty of usable scripts to get people started quickly!

Oracle Shell Scripting: More great feedback

There’s another great review on Amazon for my book Oracle Shell Scripting today.

Here’s what J. Westergaard “Oracle DBA” says about Oracle Shell Scripting:

I found this to be a good book. It was a quick and easy read, I read the whole thing in about a week. The subject matter was a bit simpler then I had expected, yet it filled in some of the basic details that the more advanced books just skip over. This is was a great book for beginning unix shell scripting.

J. highlights one of the books biggest strengths: it presents as complete a picture as possible of basic yet powerful shell scripting commands. Thanks J!

Oracle Shell ScriptingCheck out my book Oracle Shell Scripting, only $34.95 from Rampant TechPress.

Buy it now!


Ever wonder what your DBAs really do?

Ever wonder what your DBAs do when they’re not dealing with your crisis of the day? Friend and coworker Bob Watkins highlights the DBA’s main tasks in this recent article on Tech Republic.

It’s been said that the database administrator (DBA) has three basic tasks. In decreasing order of importance, they are: protect the data, protect the data, and protect the data.

Although data integrity is clearly the #1 job (who cares if the database is available or fast if the data isn’t good), the DBA has many other jobs as well. Here’s a list of the actual tasks that a DBA performs. (Some duties are common to all DBAs, and others are only required in some database environments.)

Check out the full article where Bob goes on to touch on all the major areas of the typical DBA job including backup and recovery, security, upgrades, tuning and troubleshooting. If you’re looking for a job description for a DBA this is a very good one.

Prince Rupert’s Glass Drops (explode)

When tempered glass breaks it blows into a million tiny pieces. While startling this actually makes the glass safer when it breaks as there are no large, heavy pieces which are actually more likely to harm.

I never understood why otherwise strong tempered glass would break so spectacularly but this article and the videos below of “Prince Rupert’s Drops” (small drops of tempered glass) show how the inherent tension caused by quick cooling makes glass stronger, but explosive.

via MAKE