Rating: 

This is a very detailed overview of the inner workings of Oracle. Each chapter is a small book in itself going into the detail of the subject. This might be confusing to those without a clear understanding of how databases work in general, and a background in computer science would help. Overall, the author does a nice job of explaining each topic in such a way that it would be reasonably clear either way though. There are many diagrams, tables, lists, and pictures to help explain the material. This would not be so much a reference for programming Oracle as it explains what is available in Oracle and how Oracle provides its features. The book should be usefully to Oracle DBAs and system administrators. It will also appeal to those that want a book that goes beyond stating what Oracle can do and shows how Oracle actually does what it can do.

Generally chapters cover:

Overview
Architecture
Installation and Running
Data Structures (B*-trees, etc.)
Management
Security
Performance
Concurrency
Transactions
Warehousing, Business Intelligence
Availability
Hardware
Distributed Databases
Object Oriented Development
New Features of 11g

Summary:

- The internal workings of Oracle are clearly explained through out.
- A great book for system administrator, DBAs, and those who take care of Oracle databases.