Books reviewed in Oil IT Journal

PDM Book Review - Oracle and SQL Server Integration (January 2001) The new book by Merak database guru Stephen Chelack provides an excellent overview of modern database technologies and integration.

Book review—Geomechanics applied to the petroleum industry Jean-François Nauroy’s new book balances the basics, some hard math and decent narrative across drilling and production monitoring applications of geomechanics.

Book Review—Oil & Gas Data Mining A new book provides a solid introduction to neural nets with real-world application to the oilfield.

Book Review—Just gimme the number! Oil IT Journal editor Neil McNaughton reviews a new book ‘Why Can’t You Just Give Me The Number?*’ by former Texaco probabilistic evangelist, Patrick Leach. The book is full of explanation, insight and opinion. Leach pulls together a wealth of up to date research in portfolio management, efficient frontier analysis and the impact of psychology on decision making. A great read.

Book Reviews—holiday reading (not!) Three reviews, of Neural Nets in Oil and Gas, Spatial Metadata Standards and RFID Essentials.

Oilfield business intelligence for Netezza appliances Operations and maintenance leverages Composite Software’s ‘data virtualization.’

Book Review—Alarm Management for Optimum Performance An entertaining read—packed full of practical insights of value to users and systems developers.

Book Review—Viral Data in SOA, An Enterprise Pandemic Neal Fishman’s book is an entertaining ramble on data quality and remedial methodologies.

Book Review—Ark Group ‘Taxonomies’ ‘Taxonomies: frameworks for corporate knowledge’ provides an introduction to enhanced document classification software along with an introduction to the concepts behind the ‘semantic web’.

Book review Data analysis for scientists and engineers Edward Robinson’s text book targets principally the mathematical. But there is enough narrative to intrigue the philosophically-inclined, with an intricate discussion on frequentist vs. Bayesian reasoning. But the trendy field of ‘data science’ is conspicuously absent.

Book Review, Integrating GIS with GPS Karen Steede-Terry is an ArcView GIS instructor and also a Trimble-certified trainer for Global Positioning System technology. Her book provides a good introduction to marrying GIS and GPS but the ESRI-format privileges glossy illustration over technical content.

ECCMA data cleansing whitepaper reviewed Electronic Commerce Code Management Association CIO on definitions and data project execution.

Book Review - Knowledge Management The book ‘Introduction to Knowledge Management’ is not an easy read. But coverage of Statoil’s Faros project and an in-depth look at text-processing software make it a worthwhile exercise.

Book Review—Quest for Data Quality Philippe Theys’ new book attempts to bring log data quality control into the ‘digital oilfield’ era.

Digital flume tank captures reservoir continuity, heterogeneity Geovariances Flumy—improved history matching with geostatistically-driven channel modeling.

Book Review—Oil industry E&P data management Steve Hawtin’s self-published oeuvre advocates a ‘DAMA’ approach. But does it work?

Book Review—O’Reilly’s Bad Data Handbook A disappointing hotchpotch from 19 authors covers mostly web data capture and analysis.

Books - COM & XML (August 1999) PDM book reviews “Distributed Applications with COM and VB”, and “Building an XML-based application.”

Book Review—Developing high quality data models Matthew West’s new book summarizes a lifetime’s work on data modeling in oil and other verticals.

Book Review—‘In Pursuit of the Perfect Plant’ New publication provides recipe for ‘perfection’ in process and manufacturing. But will it work?

Book review—Software Testing ITSQB study guide fails to provide ‘quick start’ for newbie testers.

Book Review - Quantitative Geosciences: Data Analytics, Geostatistics, Reservoir Characterization and Modeling Zee Ma’s monster (640 page) work sets out to fill the gap between quantitative and descriptive geoscience analysis for reservoir characterization with a systematic ‘integrative’ approach. While recent data-driven approaches are included, QG adopts essentially a mathematical and first principles approach. The fairly heavy mathematical content is balanced by Ma’s erudition and insights that run through the work. Ma argues that in-depth domain knowledge and first-class statistical know-how will trump the naïve ‘data-science’ approach.

Book review—In memory data management SAP’s SansSouciDB promises a ‘true’ relational database for both transactions and analytics.

Book review—Big data in oil and gas Keith Holdaway’s new book, ‘Harness oil and gas big data with analytics’ offers plethoric advice and opinion on the technology’s potential but falls short on compelling use cases.

Book review—Machine Learning for Hackers New book from the O’Reilly stable provides introduction to use of the ‘R’ statistics and data manipulation language whose ‘meteoric rise’ has made it the "lingua franca" of analytics.

Book review - Linked Data: storing, querying, reasoning A new book describes the evolution of the web into a web of ‘linked documents’ and the potential that semantic technologies have for making sense of it all. Plethoric, rather impenetrable, research avenues are described, as semantics meets-up with the big data movement. Making sense of ‘heterogeneous data from different sources’ appears to remain an elusive goal.

Book Review: Pipeline Spatial Data Modeling and Pipeline WebGIS Zhenpei Li’s book describes ‘PSDM’, a pipeline data model developed for China’s Yong-Hu-Ning long-distance pipeline. The book includes a short history of pipeline GIS, Li places pipeline GIS in the context of Al Gore’s 1998 ‘Digital Earth’. PSDM is a Chinese localization of the Esri APDM pipeline data model.

Book Review: A Digital Journey: The transformation of the oiland gas industry Steve Cooper and Jim Crompton’s new book traces the failures of ‘Digital Oilfield 1.0’ and the movement’s resuscitation in today’s ‘digital transformation’. Big data and analytics will fail too unless there is a renewed focus on data management fundamentals, perhaps with the deployment of a master data management solution like EnergyIQ’s TDM, used throughout in a soft sell-cum-illustration of the ‘fundamentals’. The authors argue that ‘things will be different this time’.

Book review - the Drilling Data Vortex Carlos Damski sets out to ‘put drilling data management in a business context.’ He argues against single vendor solutions with a soft sell of Genesis Petroleum Technologies’ toolset.

Book Review—DAMA data management dictionary Data Management Association’s Dictionary disappoints, falls short of Wikipedia.

Book Review—The Consilience guide to trading crude oil Oil trading has got a lot more sophisticated in the last 30 years as Consilience CEO Liz Bossley explains in her new book, Trading Crude Oil, The Consilience Guide. The Guide provides an insight into a key industry segment largely overlooked by the exploration and production practitioner.

Book Review—Software Superheroes GO TO—Software Super Heroes is an entertaining and erudite history of computer languages. Full of insight and anecdotes, GO TO traces programming from FORTAN to JAVA and Open Source.

Book Review - Oil in Texas The Olien’s new book traces the first half century of oil in Texas from Spindletop through East Texas and the Permian Basin. The size of the oilfields is matched with larger-than-life cast of entrepreneurs, lawmakers and a few geologists. A great read.

Book Review—Numerical Earth Models, Jean-Laurent Mallet New EAGE publication provides math behind, and insights to, commercial earth modeling solutions.

Book Review—Introduction to parallel programming Pete Pacheco’s textbook offers exhaustive coverage and insights on MPI, Pthreads and OpenMP.

Book Review—Programming the Semantic Web An informative, practical account of what the W3C’s RDF/OWL is and isn’t.

Book review—Integrated operations in the oil and gas industry Norway’s ‘world leading,’ digital oilfield initiatives described in 400 page volume discussing pros and cons of remote operations centers and implications for situational awareness and safety.

Book review—Integrated operations in the oil and gas industry Norway’s ‘world leading,’ digital oilfield initiatives described in 400 page volume discussing pros and cons of remote operations centers and implications for situational awareness and safety.

Book review – Advanced Storage, requirements and capabilities by Mark and Linda Kempster (June 1997) This white paper by Mark and Linda Kempster published by the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) is a remarkable compilation of information on the state of the art in storage media.

Book Review: How to Store C02 Underground Philip Ringrose’s new book, ‘How to Store CO2 Underground: Insights from early-mover CCS Projects’ is a clear, well-illustrated summary of the geological and engineering aspects of CO2 sequestration. Ringrose, who shares his affiliations between NNTU, Equinor and the University of Edinburgh, acknowledges a bias towards Norwegian and European projects and Equinor’s CCS operations. However as these, especially Equinor’s, are copiously studied and published, this is hardly a disadvantage. Ringrose’s ‘essential message’ is that the engineered geological storage of CO2 is a relatively straightforward and established technology which will be urgently needed in the coming decades.

Book Review—The Data Management Body of Knowledge DAMA Guide sets our to ‘professionalize’ data management—does it succeed?

Book review—Hadoop: The Definitive Guide Tim White’s guide to Hadoop from O’Reilly Books, now in its third edition, is a 650 page introduction to the deployment of ‘big data’ applications. But what is Hadoop? What’s in it for oil and gas?

Lies, damn lies and futzing! PDM’s editor Neil McNaughton starts out with a book revue, and ends up wondering what risk analysis is really all about...

On statistics, uncertainty and spreadsheets ... Oil IT Journal editor Neil McNaughton provides a heads-up on new functionality on the www.oilit.com website. Inspired by Patrick Leach’s book reviewed in this issue of Oil IT Journal, he returns to some earlier reflections on statistics and uncertainty—noting en passant that current spreadsheet usage, even in a compliance/reporting context, often falls way short of established industry best practice.

PPDM—first European User Group ‘What is a Well’ explained. How Hess ‘raised the bar’ on data management. BP’s competitor analysis and data strategy. Mathew West’s ‘comprehensive approach’ to information quality.

COTS, ping ’n power! Oil IT Journal editor Neil McNaughton explains how we select what gets into the Journal and what gets left out. Our decision to cover more downstream IT—particularly our coverage of this month’s IBC EU SCADA conference—has opened a Pandora’s box. Off-the-shelf hardware, the internet and the advent of the ‘e-field’ are blurring the traditional demarcation lines between the upstream and the process sector.

Oil IT Recommended reading

Here are some informative and inspirational books about Oil & Gas IT, programming and data management

TitleAuthorAffiliation
Guidelines for Safe and Reliable Instrumented Protective SystemsCenter for Chemical and Process SafetyCenter for Chemical and Process Safety
ISA-Process Safety Standards CD - 4th EditionInternational Society of AutomationInternational Society of Automation
Layer of Protection Analysis - Simplified Process Risk AssessmentCenter for Chemical Process SafetyCenter for Chemical Process Safety
Safety Integrity Level SelectionEdward M. MarszalInternational Society of Automation
Programming PearlsJon BentleyAddison Wesley
More Programming PearlsJon BentleyAddison Wesley
Alan Turing - the enigmaAndrew HodgesVintage
Data Analysis with open source toolsPhillip JanertO'Reilly
Unix Shell ProgrammingLowell Jay ArthurWiley
Perl pour l'impatient (in French)Sébastien DesreuxH&K
Go To - software superheroesSteve LohrProfile Books
Crypto - the code rebelsSteven LevyPenguin
Rebel Code - Linux and open sourceGlyn MoodyPenguin
Hackish PHPMichael FlenovAList

If you have a good book you would like to see added to this list please email info@oilit.com.