On Tue, 31 Aug 2004 05:33:19 -0700 (PDT), Rachel Carmichael <wisernet100@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > What? You mean to tell me you haven't bought a copy so I could get that > $0.0001 in royalties? Absolutely not - its written in American after all and I don't do foreign languages.... > Seriously, we did try to make DBA 101 as basic as we could. And in > general, we tried to make it version UNspecific. We did note where > things were different between versions. Based on comments from readers > of the first version, we did about a 60% rewrite of the 9i version -- > not to include the "cool" 9i stuff but to make concepts clearer. It's > hard to include all the new stuff, while keeping the important old > stuff, when you don't get an increased page count. I do think that versions are important for some types of book, and DBA 101 would be exactly one of those. I'm not for example a great fan of the 'self-managing database' tag line from our favourite software supplier, but management tasks for 10g are significantly different than those for 6.0.36 (where I started). Actually they are probably quite changed from 8i as well. Performance management is far less changed - do as little as possible as infrequently as possible would be a good adage here. - by version numbers. The same applies to good development practice and good design. > Publishers feel, rightly or wrongly, however that the buying public > wants the latest version number on the cover of the book.... So > Jonathan's book, version unspecific that it is, loses because of that > silly "8i" on the cover. I suspect that publishers are correct - anyone here interested in a 7.3.4 book? Mogens obviously needs to write a v5 book but I suspect self-publishing is the way to go for that one. I also have some sympathy. If I ask in an online forum "how do I avoid fragmentation?" I'll get a bunch of response saying it isn't an issue if I'll only run with ULMTs, a bunch of responses asking why I think I have a fragmentation problem and a bunch of responses asking me to state the Oracle version *because it is relevant to my question*. All of these are sensible responses for a specific question - they also ought to be relevant for a book. I also agree with Jonathan's statement in his preface as an approach to Oracle Management, but still think the book is, to a lesser degree than most but still not insignificantly, version dependent (meaning not it is irrelevant for 9i/10g but that it is of less use for v8.0 and below). -- Niall Litchfield Oracle DBA http://www.niall.litchfield.dial.pipex.com ---------------------------------------------------------------- Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com ---------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe send email to: oracle-l-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx put 'unsubscribe' in the subject line. -- Archives are at //www.freelists.org/archives/oracle-l/ FAQ is at //www.freelists.org/help/fom-serve/cache/1.html -----------------------------------------------------------------