Pointers to Good Books

The books that seem to leave my shelf regularly are Joe Lumbley's "Informix DBA Survival Guide" and Elizabeth Suto's "Informix Performance Tuning." The Survival Guide is aptly named -- I don't think I coulda survived the last few months w/o it. Actually one of his best suggestions was non-technical -- to go out and buy an expensive leather-bound log book and record your problems, questions, parameter changes, and little mysteries as you go. Calls to mind one of the favorite sayings of a favorite teacher of mine: "An amateur sometimes remembers, but a professional writes it down." In any case, I find that when I have a question, Lumbley can answer it (or at least take me to the next step) more than 90% of the time. Suto's book is notable for clarity, brevity, and lack of ambiguity. It gives some clear rules of thumb and very clear descriptions of architecture, etc. I've also found the Informix documentation to be invaluable -- the section in my admin manual that describes paramters, what they mean, and how to set them is very well-thumbed. My next project is getting dbcockpit installed. All those onstat -foo commands sure are entertaining, but having an interactive graphical view of what's going on with drill-down and alarm capability sounds like just the thing. Mark McDonough Knowledge Systems, Inc.