Optimizing Oracle Performance

Chapter 1. A Better Way to Optimize

For many people, Oracle performance is a very difficult problem. Since 1990, I’ve worked with thousands of professionals engaged in performance improvement projects for their Oracle systems. Oracle performance improvement projects appear to progress through standard stages over time. I think the names of those stages are stored in a vault somewhere beneath Geneva. If I remember correctly, the stages are:

Unrestrained optimism

Informed pessimism

Panic

Denial

Despair

Utter despair

Misery and famine

For some reason, my colleagues and I are rarely invited to participate in a project until the “misery and famine” stage. Here is what performance improvement projects often look like by the time we arrive. Do they sound like situations you’ve seen before?

Technical experts disagree over root causes

The severity of a performance problem is proportional to the number of people who show up at meetings to talk about it. It’s a particularly bad sign when several different companies’ “best experts” show up in the same meeting. In dozens of meetings throughout my career, I’ve seen the “best experts” from various consulting companies, computer and storage subsystem manufacturers, software vendors, and network providers convene to dismantle a performance problem. In exactly 100% of these meetings I’ve attended, these groups have argued incessantly over the identity of a performance problem’s root cause. For weeks. How can dedicated, smart, well-trained, and well-intentioned ...