I would like to extend my thanks and appreciation, first of all to my fellow co-authors, Mr. Guenadi Jilevski and Mr. Syed Jaffar Hussain who were wonderful to work with on this book. I also would like to thank everyone at Packt who made tremendous efforts, especially Kerry George, Poorvi, and Gaurav at Packt for their patience and help in the editorial process. Last but not least, my heartfelt appreciation goes out to our fantastic technical review team of Oracle experts — Mr. Howard Ostrow, Fairlie Rogo, Ronald Rood, and Ann L.R. Mckinnell — who provided tons of great feedback to ensure technical accuracy and quality. I also would like to dedicate this book to all fellow Oracle DBAs and consultants who work in the trenches to solve real world Oracle issues. Howard is a top Oracle RAC expert and former Director at Oracle Corporation and Fairlie is a top notch Oracle DBA with a keen ability to provide insight into the advanced and complex areas of the Oracle database engine.

I also would like to thank the many Oracle professionals who have helped me as an Oracle professional over the years to make such a book like this possible, including Julian Dyke (Oracle RAC master extraordinaire), Tom Kyte, Don Burleson, Jonathan Lewis, Francisco Alvarez Munoz, Alex Gorbachev, Dan Norris, Doug Hahn, Tanel Poder, Arup Nanda, Robert Freeman, Tim Hall, and all of my current and past clients who allowed me to help them with their Oracle database challenges. I dedicate this book to my friends, family, colleagues, and all of the Oracle database professionals who work long and hard over weekends, nights, and holidays to keep their database systems online and running smoothly.

I would like to thank my parents who made me what I am, and my co-authors, the Packt Publishing team (Kerry George, Poorvi Nair, James Lumsden, and Gaurav Datar), and technical reviewers (Ann McKinnell ,Fairlie Rego , and Ronald Rodd) for their dedication, support, understanding, and patience during the course of the book publishing.

I would like to dedicate this book to my parents Mr. and Mrs. Saifulla.

First of all, I owe a very big thank to my wife Ayesha and my three sons (Ashfaq, Arfan, and Aahil) for sacrificing their invaluable time and allowing me to concentrate on the book. I am thankful to Alinma Bank management and my immediate boss Mr. Majed Saleh AlShuaibi for their encouragement and continuous support. My special thanks goes to my two younger brothers, Sabdar and Shafiullah, and my friend Khusro Mohammed Khan (who are also Oracle DBAs) for preparing required platforms, testing code, and doing initial review of the chapters. I also want to thank all my colleagues, Mohammed Farooqui, Zaheer, Khaja Mainuddin, Shaukat Ali, Naresh, Hussain AlKalifah, Faisal Bakhashwain, Mohammed Asmat Pasha, Naser Ali AlEssa, Mohammed Alsalahi, Wayne Philips, Chand Basha, Rizwan Siddiqi, Sadak, Anees, Shakir, Angelo G Train, Mohammed Khidir, Asad Khan, Raheem, Ibrahim Ali, and other friends for their encouragement and motivation. I thank all the staff at Packt Publications who were involved with this books and special mention to James Lumsden, Kerry George, Poorvi Nair, and Gaurav Datar for being patient with me during the course of this book. I would also like to express my gratitude towards Ann L. R. McKinnell, Fairlie Rego, and Ronald Rood

Last but not the least, I also thank other RAC book authors, Murali Vallath, K. Gopalakrishnan, Nitin Vengulkar, Julian Dyke, and other Oracle experts worldwide for being my inspiration.