Oracle Parallel Processing

Acknowledgments

A great number of people have come together to make this book a reality. Our thanks go out to Debby Russell, editor of the O’Reilly Oracle Series, for sharing our vision and agreeing to sign this book. Many others at O’Reilly & Associates also had a hand in this book. Jeff Holcomb was the production editor for the book. Edie Freedman did the cover design. Robert Romano and Rhon Porter took our rough figure drawings and turned them into the art that you now see in this book.

We are grateful to our developmental editor, Jonathan Gennick, for his guidance and encouragement. He provided suggestions at every level of detail and corrected flaws in our writing. He sharpened the text considerably, making this book more readable. We thank the technical reviewers: Ross Mohan, Scott Heisey, Durinda Jones, Christopher Gait, Dave Morgan, Charles Dye, and Narasimha Sarma Brahmanapalli for their feedback, which helped to improve this book.

Special thanks are due to Ken Jacobs, Angelo Prucino, Jonathan Creighton, George Lumpkin, and Alok Srivastav, all of Oracle Corporation. These people generously went out of their way to perform a last-minute technical review of this work and helped us resolve several lingering issues in the text. We would also like to thank Roger Bamford of Oracle Corporation for giving permission to reproduce one of the graphs (Figure 8.9) from an Oracle publication.

From Tushar

I thank my colleague BN Sarma for the many technical discussions we have had on OPS and for his enthusiasm in exploring and experimenting with new Oracle features. Special thanks to Vernon Veira for his vision and interest in new technology that enabled us to use OPS. Thanks to Robert Shapiro for inviting me to give a talk on OPS, which sparked the idea to write this book. Thanks to Sanjay, the coauthor of this book, for his cooperation and best efforts. Finally, thanks to my family: my parents for their continued support; my wife Sasmita for her patience and understanding that chores would get done tomorrow; my children Sibjeet and Sweta—warm hugs to them for allowing me to take the weekends away from them for this book project.

From Sanjay

Thanks to Tushar, my coauthor, for originating the idea of writing this book. I thank the many people with whom I have interacted during my professional and academic career who enhanced my understanding of Oracle in particular, and software systems in general.

Finally, I owe a great debt of thanks to my wife, Sudipti, whom I married during the course of writing this book. I could never have written this book without her incredible patience, understanding, and encouragement.