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.