Got some pennies, brother? For just 33 cents—plus a little more for shipping and handling—you can have a used copy of the best book on Oracle internals that was ever written: Oracle8i Internal Services for Waits, Latches, Locks, and Memory by Steve Adams. Yes it doesn’t have the word RAC in it, but what is RAC but OPS (Oracle Parallel Server) by a new name? It is one of the three really great Oracle books listed below that you may be tempted to ignore because the titles have the word 8i in them.

Why haven’t the authors kept updating their books? As I’ve experienced myself, there is very little money in writing books and it’s very hard work besides. And, as Mogens Norgaard recounts, when Jonathan Lewis was asked if his book Practical Oracle8i would ever be published in an updated 9i version, his response was to suggest that we put a sticker with a “9” over the “8” on the cover of his book, because the advice, methods and techniques described in the book were still very valid with Oracle9i.

There’s definitely some downside to reading a book that deals with an older version of a technology but, in the case of these three books, I believe that the upsides outweigh the downsides.

P.S. If you haven’t got a penny, James Morle has made his book available for free download.

Oracle8i Internal Services for Waits, Latches, Locks, and Memory by Steve Adams (Paperback - Oct 11, 1999) 19 used from $0.33

Scaling Oracle8i(TM): Building Highly Scalable OLTP System Architectures by James Morle (Paperback - Jan 2, 2000) 16 used from $1.00

Practical Oracle8i(TM): Building Efficient Databases by Jonathan Lewis (Paperback - Dec 28, 2000) 30 used from $2.49