Oracle Essentials, 4th Edition

Chapter 7. Oracle Performance

As this book illustrates, the Oracle database has a wide range of features. As you gain experience with Oracle, you’ll reap more of the benefits it has to offer. One area on which you will eventually focus is performance tuning, since you will inevitably be forced to wring additional performance from your Oracle database in the face of increasing demands. This chapter gives you the basics you’ll need to understand as you address performance.

Oracle database performance tuning has been extensively documented in the Oracle community. There are numerous books that provide detailed and excellent information; many of these are listed in Appendix B. This book is focused more on the concepts of the Oracle database, so we won’t delve too deeply into specific tuning recommendations. Instead, we’ll touch on the importance of tuning and discuss some basic notions of how Oracle uses resources. Here, we’re simply laying a foundation for understanding Oracle performance. This understanding will help you implement the tuning procedures most suited for your own particular implementation. Where appropriate, we’ll provide some basic guidance on how the latest Oracle features help you manage performance.

Certainly, Oracle provides more and better automated tuning options in the current release than it did when we wrote earlier editions of this book. However, getting optimal performance is about more than tuning. There is no substitute for getting your hardware platform ...