BOOKS: The CMDB Imperative and the Data Access Handbook

I recently received the following books:

• The CMDB Imperative: How to Realize the Dream and Avoid the Nightmares, by Glenn O'Donnel and Carlos Casanova; Prentice Hall PTR; March 2009


• The Data Access Handbook: Achieving Optimal Database Application Performance and Scalability, by John Goodson and Robert A. Steward; Prentice Hall PTR; March2009

The CMDB Imperative has online excerpts and "extras" available from its InformIT.com homepage. It also has its own website at cmdbimperative.com where you can find additional resources, previews and excerpts, and a cmdbimperative blog. The "blurb" for the book is:

Implement Configuration Management Databases that Deliver Rapid ROI and Sustained Business Value. Implementing an enterprise-wide Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is one of the most influential actions an IT organization can take to improve service delivery and bridge the gap between technology and the business. With a well-designed CMDB in place, companies are better positioned to manage and optimize IT infrastructure, applications, and services; automate more IT management tasks; and restrain burgeoning costs. Now, there’s an objective, vendor-independent guide to making a CMDB work in your organization. The CMDB Imperative presents a start-to-finish implementation methodology that works and describes how the CMDB is shifting to the superior Configuration Management System (CMS).

Expert CMDB industry analyst Glenn O’Donnell and leading-edge architect and practitioner Carlos Casanova first review the drivers behind a CMDB and the technical, economic, cultural, and political obstacles to success. Drawing on the experiences of hundreds of organizations, they present indispensable guidance on architecting and customizing CMDB solutions to your specific environment. They’ll guide you through planning, implementation, transitioning into production, day-to-day operation and maintenance, and much more. Coverage includes:

• Defining the tasks and activities associated with configuration management
• Understanding the CMDB’s role in ITIL and the relationship between CMDBs and ITIL v3’s CMS
• Building software models that accurately represent each entity in your IT environment
• Ensuring information accuracy via change management and automated discovery
• Understanding the state of the CMDB market and selling the CMDB within your organization
• Creating federated CMDB architectures that successfully balance autonomy with centralized control
• Planning a deployment strategy that sets appropriate priorities and reflects a realistic view of your organization’s maturity
• Integrating systems and leveraging established and emerging standards
• Previewing the future of the CMDB/CMS and how it will be impacted by key trends such as virtualization, SOA, mobility, convergence, and “flexi-sourcing”

The Data Access Handbook also has online excerpts and "extras" available from its InformIT.com homepage as well as its own website at dataaccesshandbook.com where you can find additional resources, excerpts and code-samples and its own communiuty-site. The "blurb" for The Data Access Handbook is:

Drive breakthrough database application performance by optimizing middleware and connectivity. Performance and scalability are more critical than ever in today’s enterprise database applications, and traditional database tuning isn’t nearly enough to solve the performance problems you are likely to see in those applications. Nowadays, 75-95% of the time it takes to process a data request is typically spent in the database middleware. Today’s worst performance and scalability problems are generally caused by issues with networking, database drivers, the broader software/hardware environment, and inefficient coding of data requests. In The Data Access Handbook, two of the world’s leading experts on database access systematically address these issues, showing how to achieve remarkable improvements in performance of real-world database applications.

Drawing on their unsurpassed experience with every leading database system and database connectivity API, John Goodson and Rob Steward reveal the powerful ways middleware affects application performance and guide developers with designing and writing API code that will deliver superior performance in each leading environment. In addition to covering essential concepts and techniques that apply across database systems and APIs, they present many API examples for ODBC, JDBC, and ADO.NET as well as database system examples for DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, and Sybase. Coverage includes:

• Clearly understanding how each component of database middleware can impact performance and scalability
• Writing database applications to reduce network traffic, limit disk I/O, optimize application-to-driver interaction, and simplify queries—including examples for ODBC, JDBC, and ADO.NET
• Managing connections, transactions, and SQL statement execution more efficiently
• Making the most of connection and statement pooling
• Writing good benchmarks to predict your application’s performance
• Systematically resolving performance problems—including eight start-to-finish case-study examples