database management systems

This book is written by a DBA for DBAs. Their is no hemming and hawing in this book when it comes to actual tuning recommendations. The author has done a good job at imparting his knowledge to us. This is knowledge he has won in the trenches on our behalf. Im glad Phil included Chapte3 on Logical and physical design. I can use it to show my manager how it should be done. The chapters on Type-2 indexes, tuning bufferpools, including the new block-based bufferpools, the Chapter on SQL tuning makes it very clear on how to identify, tune SQL, or create indexes to eliminates all those sorts that I dind in my Peoplesoft and Siebel systems running rampant. This book tells you about all the new features in V8 and tell's you how to use them. It is a good mixture between V8 enhancements and contains extensive tuning techniques, methodologies, and good examples where needed. You need to have this book to tune-up your databases. I also like Snow's book for the day to day admin tasks. I can't wait for the second edition of this book to come it, cause you know it will just build on the wealth of information provided in the 1st edition.

I bought this book to find out the latest and greatest with V8, but found all kinds of tuning information as well. After reading this book I can now tune bufferpools, SQL and a whole suite of DBM and DB CFG parameters. The chapter on Type-2 indexes really helped me to understand them and there is also a migration plan presented. And the chapter on logical and physical design remind me how a database should be designed. I've already shared that with my data modelers. I'm very impressed with the details in this book. Heck, I carry it with me since all the DB2 catalog tables are in Appendix A. And lastly, the chapter on monitoring on SQL Snapshot functions, with details on how to insert the output into an SQL Snapshot repository, along with the new event monitor write-to-table capability, has given me the capability to truly have a historical respository of performance data.

This book is really well organized. The section on logical and physical design was a good review for me. It reminded me how important a good design is to a successful database implementation. The SQL Tuning, Buffer pool tuning, and DB and DBM CFG tuning chapters have helped me take care of my problem databases and suboptimal SQL.