Tom Kyte is probably the best “explainer” in the Oracle community. This book is superbly organized and delivers the essential details of the Oracle architecture.
Oracle Reading List
Below are the Oracle books that I have found most useful. Hopefully it this will be like a living version of the bibliography from Oracle Performance Survival Guide.
Of course, this list is limited to those books I've actually been able to find time to read! There are many great books that I haven't had a chance to look at yet. My apologies to those whose books I've omitted. Also, my own books are not here and I think some of those are OK too!
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Jonathan Lewis is one of the most respected independent Oracle experts in the world. This book is an outstanding work of research, in which the operations of the Oracle optimizer are thoroughly investigated and described.
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Craig Shallahamer is one of the pioneers of Oracle performance management. This book contains some of the most in-depth coverage of Oracle performance internals such as latching, hashing and buffer cache management.
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A relatively recent addition, this book is well written and covers many 11g concepts. It emphasizes an application design approach to performance
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Probably the best book – by far the most popular book - on the PL/SQL language. Steven is a truly gifted author and this book is a pleasure to read. The book covers many aspects of PL/SQL performance. A fifth edition may have been published by the time you read this.
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A thorough but concise coverage of Data warehouse star schema implementation in Oracle
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Carey Millsap is one of the pioneers of empirical Oracle performance management. This book is somewhat dated technically (Oracle 9i era) but his approach to performance optimization still stands. The section on queuing theory is a must if you want to dive into that advanced topic.
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This book will probably scare you - it runs through all the security vulnerabilities of an Oracle database. Really opened my eyes
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Originally a self-published “Lulu” book, now published by Apress. This book contains a collection of undocumented Oracle features, many of which are performance related. The sections on raw SQL trace format and on PGA memory allocations are particularly relevant
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A good, up to date introduction to Oracle Database administration
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Excellent coverage of RAC administration and tuning. The Linux-only perspective results in a deeper level of coverage in many cases, since a lot of RAC networking is OS specific.
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A solid coverage of RAC installation and management.
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ASM is a complete technology in its own right and this book does a very good job of covering the technology. The forward, in which the creator of ASM describes its objectives and history is well worth reading.
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A little out of date, but still has some very good material on a wide variety of wait events that aren't well documented in the standard documentation.
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What can you say about a book that includes chapters from Jonathan Lewis, Pete Finnigan, Alex Gorbachev and other heroes of the Oracle Oak table?