Optimizing Oracle Performance

Preface

Optimizing Oracle response time is, for the most part, a solved problem. I hope that I have written effectively enough that, after reading this book, this idea will come to fruition in your own experience.

However, if you’re like most people, you probably don’t feel that way yet. For most people, Oracle performance improvement projects are long, frustrating battles against some invisible enemy that evades detection no matter how much time or extra computer hardware you throw at the situation. The root cause of the problem is that most education about tuning is broken. My aims in this book are to show you why, and to reveal to you what you should do instead.

Bad tuning methods have prospered among the Oracle community for a long time. For well over a decade, the Oracle community has been afflicted with lots of performance problems but a virtual absence of competent training programs for performance analysts. The result has been a lucrative seller’s market for the Oracle performance analyst. Throughout the 1990s in many parts of the world, a consultant could name his own price and bill by the hour for time spent attempting to improve performance. The tuning methods that evolved in this environment were geared more toward maximizing a consultant’s revenue intake than maximizing the success of your system.

Why I Wrote This Book

I began my Oracle career in 1989 as a new employee of Oracle Corporation itself. By 1992, I felt reasonably competent as a performance specialist. My performance ...