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Creative Commons licensed release version 1.0
Once upon a time Jonathan Lewis was asked if his book Practical Oracle8i would ever be published in an updated 9i version? His response was to suggest that you put a sticker with a `9' over the `8' on the cover of his book, because the advise, methods and techniques described in the book were still very valid with Oracle9i. How true.
It is even more true for James' book Scaling Oracle8i. As you can read in his welcome note, a few of the technologies mentioned have vanished or shifted, but most of the contents are more valid than ever.
It always was, and still is, one of the very, very few books on the Oracle scene that resulted from real research - which is obvious when you read it. The goal was to write about Oracle AND all the things surrounding it, including operating systems, middle-tiers and I/O sub-systems.
James spent more than two years writing this book, and that's how he goes about things: Do it right or not at all. His relative youth (well, he's much younger than me!) and his many impressive achievements show a man of dedication.
It is typical of James to take the problem of the `8i' (and therefore sacking sales) and find a unique solution: Offer the book free via a new GPL-like license. He is very good both at finding solutions to problems - and also to locate solutions in need of problems. For instance, in the last month or so (I'm writing this in July 2004) I have seen him fill up his garage with a lot of sound equipment (I believe we passed the 12,500 Watt output mark recently) and create a new outfit called "Scalable Sound Systems". Now all he needs is to find a concert somewhere that can use all this stuff. His garage also features an EMC SAN, fibre optics to his house, a 4-5 node RAC cluster and all his guitar and drum kit (he plays rather well).
James is always full of ideas and projects. The whole idea of the BAARF Party (Battle Against Any RAID Five - www.baarf.com), the idea of the OakTable Press series (by Apress), and papers like Unbreakable and Sane SAN - and now the Turbosound madness in his garage - show you a person to watch.
It is with great honour that I invite you to read this book.
Welcome to the Creative Commons version of my book. It's been a few years since I wrote this book. In fact, it has been nearly five years, and three to four Oracle releases since the last edits were dispatched. Five years is a long time in the computer business, and four Oracle releases would allude to this book now being totally out of date. Not so, however, as the underpinnings of this book are those of timeless computer science principles and approaches, and basic physics. Nevertheless, the title of this book, Scaling Oracle8i, is very guilty of hiding the true messages of this text.
So what's changed since the book went to press? Well, hardware companies such as Sequent have been acquired and closed down, leaving the hardware chapter looking a little dated. However, the principles of NUMA have been widely adopted on platforms such as the Sun Fire 15K and the HP Superdome, so the knowledge of NUMA principles is still highly valuable. Parallel Server has been superceded by Real Application Clusters (RAC), but the principles behind minimizing the overhead of cross-instance coherency are still hugely important aspects of implementing RAC.
I have intentionally not changed or edited the text in any way, other than including this new foreword, and the addition of the Creative Commons licensing information. For those not familiar with Creative Commons, it is a GPL-style licensing for non-software articles. Yes, that's right - you can distribute this book freely to whomever you wish, subject to the restrictions in the Creative Commons license, detailed at the end of this introduction.
In 2000 I founded Scale Abilities Ltd., a specialist consulting company based in the UK. I sometimes tell my clients that my area of depth is my breadth. This sounds like a strange thing to say, but in a world where technicians are adopting an increasingly narrow focus, it is tremendously valuable to be able to advise on almost any part of the technology stack. Coupled with the experience that can only be gained building some of the largest Oracle systems, Scale Abilities is able to authoritively guide our clients through their challenges. In addition, I try to devote a reasonable proportion of my business days to R&D projects - software development prototypes, idea development, and free tools for download from the Scale Abilities website:
The book will be available in two forms: An Adobe Acrobat PDF format, containing the whole text, and an online HTML version that can easily be linked to and referenced online. The PDF version is fully distributable, and anybody can make it available on their own website for download. The HTML version will only be available at the Scale Abilities website.
The licensing of the work is what is known as a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license. This is one of the more restrictive versions of the CC license, but if somebody can convince me otherwise I might consider relaxing some more of these restrictions. The full legal description of the license is available at:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/legalcode
A more human-readable version is available at:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0
I dedicate this book to my long suffering wife, Elaine, and my children Becky, Connor and Holly. Due to an administrative error going to press, the hard copy of the book never included this much deserved dedication, so I hope I can make up for this in the electronic version.
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Scale Abilities Ltd http://www.scaleabilities.co.uk Voice: +44 1285 644533 info@scaleabilities.co.uk |
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