The Oracle relational database management system is the most popular database system in use today. Organizations ranging from government agencies to small businesses, from large financial institutions to universities, use Oracle to make sense of their data. Running on computers as diverse as mainframes, minicomputers, workstations, PCs, and Macintoshes, Oracle provides virtually identical functions across machine boundaries. Oracle offers tremendous power and flexibility, but at some cost. Demands for fast response, particularly in online transaction processing systems, make performance a major issue. With more organizations downsizing and adopting client-server and distributed database approaches, performance tuning becomes all the more vital. This book pulls together the experiences of many Oracle system users and administrators who have learned how to tune their Oracle systems --running either RDBMS Version 6 or Version 7--to best advantage. It answers questions like:

• "I've been waiting 30 minutes for a response to my query-- what's going on?"
• "My system administrator says our system is I/O-bound-- what can I do?"
• "Our application ran fine in testing, but the response is terrible now that we're in production--help!"

Too many organizations respond to performance problems by throwing money at the problems--either by buying larger and more expensive computers or by hiring expert consultants. But, whether you're a manager, a designer, a programmer, a database administrator, or a system administrator, there's a lot you can do on your own to dramatically increase the performance of your existing Oracle system. You may find that this book can save you the cost of a new machine; at the very least, it will save you a lot of headaches.

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