PeopleSoft for the Oracle DBA

The newest addition to the OakTable Press series, PeopleSoft for the Oracle DBA, will teach you a range of techniques for maintaining a PeopleSoft system. You will then become able to implement techniques like indexing, implementing DDL, managing tablespaces, and fixing low-performing SQL queries. Author, Kurtz, is a field expert and thus, provides answers to common questions that arise when using PeopleSoft on an Oracle database.

Kurtz begins the book with an architecture overview, then proceeds to BEA Tuxedo, PeopleSoft's application server. Kurtz transitions smoothly between subsequent chapters, explaining database structures, connectivity, keys and indexing, the PeopleSoft DDL, and tablespaces. Kurtz gives appropriate weight to advanced topics as well, like schemas, performance metrics, performance monitoring utilities, and SQL optimization techniques. And the final chapters provide crucial, advanced information about Tuxedo.

Having studied Physics at UCL, Kurtz was introduced to Oracle in 1989 and spent 6 years in a software house as an Oracle Developer/DBA, working on assurance and insurance software. In 1996, Kurtz joined PeopleSoft in the UK, starting out in support and gradually moving into consultancy, over several years. Since there was virtually no internal documentation about how PeopleSoft related to the database, Kurtz began learning it by himself. This led to fixing performance problems in PeopleSoft systems. Soon enough, Kurtz was spending all of his time on performance-related consultancy.

Kurtz left PeopleSoft in 2000, and set up Go-Faster Consultancy Ltd. (www.go-faster.co.uk), providing performance and technical consultancy to PeopleSoft users. Since then, Kurtz has learned to apply principles of wait-based tuning to the database, and to the PeopleSoft layers atop the database. Kurtz has been a member of the UK Oracle User Group since 1994, and became chairman of the Unix SIG in 2000. He presents regularly at PeopleSoft and UKOUG conferences and SIG meetings. After a roundtable discussion at a PeopleSoft conference in 2002, Kurtz started the lively PeopleSoft DBA Forum on yahoo, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/psftdba/.