Optimizing Oracle Performance

Foreword

Seldom does an editor have the privilege of editing a book such as this one. From the moment I first saw Cary Millsap’s and Jeff Holt’s proposal for a book called Optimizing Oracle Response Time (that was the original working title) I knew I’d struck gold. This book has everything an editor dreams of: talented authors, rigorous research, groundbreaking material.

I remember well my first foray into Oracle performance tuning. It was back in the Oracle7 days when I was becoming grounded in Oracle. I’d just been handed DBA responsibility for all the databases used by my development group, and what better way to begin my career as an Oracle DBA, I thought, than to make an impact via some serious tuning? So I bought a book. And I read the Oracle manual. I learned about the buffer cache, the shared pool, and hit-ratios.

It all seemed so simple. The previous DBA had never done any tuning, so all I needed to do was tweak a few parameter settings, use hit-ratios to find the optimum memory allocations for the buffer cache and shared pool, and then I could kick back, bask in the glory of a job well done, and drink in the praises from my fellow developers who would no doubt be awed at how fast I could make their programs run.

Only it didn’t work the way I’d envisioned. I doubled the size of my buffer cache, but nothing seemed to run any faster. I cut my buffer cache in half from its original size, but nothing seemed to run any slower. I increased the shared pool. I decreased the shared ...