Optimizing Oracle Performance

BUY THIS BOOK

Print Book $34.95

PDF $27.99

Safari Books Online

What is this?

Print Book £24.95

What is this?

Looking to Reprint or License this content?

Tell a friend

Optimizing Oracle Performance

By Cary Millsap
With Jeff�Holt
First Edition September 2003
Pages: 416
ISBN 10: 0-596-00527-X | ISBN 13: 9780596005276
(Average of 2 Customer Reviews)

Book description

Oracle DBAs and developers are all too familiar with the outlay of time and resources, blown budgets, missed deadlines, and marginally effective performance fiddling that is commonplace with traditional methods of Oracle performance tuning. In Optimizing Oracle Performance, Cary Millsap, former VP of Oracle's System Performance Group, clearly and concisely explains how to use Oracle's response time statistics to diagnose and repair performance problems. Cary also shows how "queueing theory" can be applied to response time statistics to predict the impact of upgrades and other system changes. The price of this essential book will be paid back in hours saved the first time its methods are used.
Full Description

Oracle system performance inefficiencies often go undetected for months or even years--even under intense scrutiny--because traditional Oracle performance analysis methods and tools are fundamentally flawed. They're unreliable and inefficient. Oracle DBAs and developers are all too familiar with the outlay of time and resources, blown budgets, missed deadlines, and marginally effective performance fiddling that is commonplace with traditional methods of Oracle performance tuning. In this crucial book, Cary Millsap, former VP of Oracle's System Performance Group, clearly and concisely explains how to use Oracle's response time statistics to diagnose and repair performance problems. Cary also shows how "queueing theory" can be applied to response time statistics to predict the impact of upgrades and other system changes. Optimizing Oracle Performance eliminates the time-consuming, trial-and-error guesswork inherent in most conventional approaches to tuning. You can determine exactly where a system's performance problem is, and with equal importance, where it is not, in just a few minutes--even if the problem is several years old. Optimizing Oracle Performance cuts a path through the complexity of current tuning methods, and streamlines an approach that focuses on optimization techniques that any DBA can use quickly and successfully to make noticeable--even dramatic--improvements. For example, the one thing database users care most about is response time. Naturally, DBAs focus much of their time and effort towards improving response time. But it is entirely too easy to spend hundreds of hours to improve important system metrics such as hit ratios, average latencies, and wait times, only to find users are unable to perceive the difference. And an expensive hardware upgrade may not help either. It doesn't have to be that way. Technological advances have added impact, efficiency, measurability, predictive capacity, reliability, speed, and practicality to the science of Oracle performance optimization. Optimizing Oracle Performance shows you how to slash the frustration and expense associated with unraveling the true root cause of any type of performance problem, and reliably predict future performance. The price of this essential book will be paid back in hours saved the first time its methods are used.

Browse within this book

Cover | Table of Contents | Colophon

Featured customer reviews

Really Great Reading, September 04 2004

Rating:

Submitted by Paul Dyer [Respond | View]

It has been quite some time since I had read a tech book cover to cover. This book presents valuable tuning information that has been a long time coming. The information meets my specific needs to solve performance issues in a direct, time-efficient manner. Trial-and-Error is no longer part of my work ethic. With C.Milsap's new tuning methodology, a deteministic approach to Oracle tuning is available for Oracle professionals.

My biggest regret is that I didn't have this information earlier; during the previous 3 or 4 multi-month efforts at tuning long-running SQL batch jobs. Each of my tuning efforts was a success in the end, but not without a significant waste of time using Trial-and-Error, or Intuition-via-Guess.

Also, I would like to thank the author for his work in Queuing Model Theory. Very, very few teachers and writers can deliver a useful and understandable presentation of queuing theory.

Optimizing Oracle Performance Review, March 29 2004

Rating:

Submitted by Thierry Brouwers [Respond | View]

This book is amazing. As a true believer in the methods put forth by Hotsos,

highlighted in various whitepapers available online, and a great admirer of the technical expertise brought forward by all Oaktable members (of which I had the distinct privilege to meet a few), I didn't have to think twice about this purchase. I read it twice cover to cover during one weekend, as the author's enthusiasm really rubs off.

While other books often just list an array of scripts and seemingly random pieces of information to equip the reader with the means to do Oracle performance tuning, this book not only arms you with the technical know-how, but also an inspiring 'can-do' frame of mind plus the author's proven way of tackling performance issues.

Surprisingly, this book is an easy read. But very hard to put down.

If you've heard of Hotsos.com, you've probably got a copy of this book already.

If you haven't, you're in for a treat.

Thierry Brouwers

Freelance OCP Oracle DBA

DB Minded

Belgium

Read all reviews

Media reviews "It is our privilege to honor Cary Millsap and coauthor Jeff Holt of Hotsos as Oracle as Oracle Magazine's Authors of the Year for 2004, an award that reflects the status of Millsap's book, 'Optimizing Oracle Performance', as a definitive tuning text."
http://www.hotsos.com/e-library/oop.html

"I can gladly report that the book both met and exceeded my expectations. I can easily say (and I don't say this about many books) that this book is a must read for anybody who wants to get better response time out of their Oracle database...Overall rating: 9.5/10 - The content is excellent, and any Oracle performance analyst will benefit immensely by reading and applying these techniques in their shop."
--Dan Hanks,Provo Linux Users Group, December 2003
http://brainshed.com/reviews/ora_opt_oracle_perf.html

"Oracle performance analysts are always looking for ways to optimize response time. Now two of the industry's most dedicated performance-optimization experts provide the timesaving method Oracle DBAs and developers have been waiting for...The authors dispense with database-centric metrics and instead show how to use Oracle's response-time statistics to diagnose performance problems in an Oracle application system. Millsap and Holt also show how eliminating requests for unneeded work improves performance dramatically and how the mathematical discipline of queuing theory can be combined with response time-metrics to accurately predict the impact of system changes and upgrades."
--"Oracle," October 2003

Read all reviews

See larger cover