I didn't notice that this pocket reference was still in its first printing, from January of 2002. As such most of the content is now obsolete. Specifically the author devotes a lot of space to comparing the Rule-Based and Cost-Based Optimizers, and points out the clear superiority of the latter. This was big news when Oracle 9i was about to be released, not so much now.



As to the rest, there are 22 pages (out of merely 102) enumerating the many hints one can apply to SQL. There's not much here that isn't already available from Oracle documentation directly.