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DB2 Universal Database v7.1 for UNIX, Linux, Windows and OS/2 Database Administration Certification Guide (4th Edition)
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Author: George Baklarz, Bill Wong, Jonathan Cook
List Price: $59.99
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0130913669
Publisher: Prentice Hall PTR (30 October, 2000)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 45,157
Average Customer Rating: 3.14 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 3 out of 5
Didn't Hit the High Notes
This book does have a solid base, and easily covers all of the requirements for the DB2 Fundamentals exam. However, it begins to come up short for the DB2 Administrator test. Many areas are not particularly well explained, and the description of the DB2 product family is a complete hash job, and really leaves you none the wiser.Perhaps the most annoying part of this book is that there is no public errata, and I quickly found two errors. Given that this is a certification book, it's crucial that it's accurate. The author e-mailed me and pointed out that the mistakes were corrected for the Version 8 book, and that the publishers didn't give them any web space for an errata. Overall, a good book. However, a book written by IBMers on an IBM product for an IBM exam should be final word on the subject. Unfortunately, this is not the case, and I would suggest looking at the 'All in One' Gold books.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Don't rely on this to master the material
I used this book to prepare for the 512 and 513 exam as well as a prerequisite to attending the CF231 DB2 Database Administration Workshop. The book worked well to get a slight head start on the class. However, it does not prepare you to do well for the 512 exam (took and passed yesterday, but am not pleased w/ the score). The sample questions were woefully inadequate. There were a ton of questions that were not addressed at all in the material and you really need a much better understanding of SQL than the book provides. I'm taking the 513 exam next Monday, and am planning to study other material before then.
Rating: 2 out of 5
Surprisingly Poor
Given the authors' qualifications, you would expect a much better book. The organization is frankly dreadful, the exposition confusing, and the samples inconsistent with the software provided. It seems to morph without warning from a manual to a marketing pamphlet: it is exasperating to be looking for a solid technical description and to find instead a vague sales pitch. The information is there, mostly, but it is not easy to dig it out of the swirling chaos of this book. It is not as bad, however, as the first chapter (the "Product Overview") would make you think. This is a an indiscriminant farrago of marketing hype, inexplicable repetitions, and crucial omissions. One example: the book says, in a section on DB2 Enterprise Edition, that this edition is "scalable from single processors to symmetric multiprocessors and to massively parallel clusters." Which leaves the distinct impression that the Enterprise Edition will run on multiple machines, which it will not -- that's the Enterprise *Extended* Edition. In a chapter purporting to help you understand the distinctions between products, this is egregious misinformation. Another example: it describes DataJoiner in exactly the same terms as Relational Connect, making it seem as though they were the same product for different database vendors, and that someone just arbitrarily decided to give the product for Oracle a different name (in fact Relational Connect is the successor to DataJoiner, and *both* of them run against Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server, and Oracle. But you could never discover that from this book). IBM's database product packaging is confusing enough without help like this. The rest of the book is better (it could not easily be worse), which is why I gave it a grudging two stars. The sections on SQL are pretty decent, and I found the description of structured types helpful. The chapter on security is confusing, but that's mostly because DB2's security *is* confusing. The sample test questions, as someone else mentioned, are genuinely helpful in giving you a feel for the exam. So -- do NOT use this book as your only, or even your main, study guide. It's moderately useful supplemental reference (though like most technical survey books, it's horribly under-indexed). Use the dummies books, which, though scanty, are at least intelligible and intelligently organized; or use "the gold book" -- the "DB2 Administration All-In-One Exam Guide" which is a respectable technical reference.
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