Oracle Essentials: Oracle9i, Oracle8i and Oracle8, Second Edition

Chapter 6. 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 should focus is performance tuning. This chapter gives you the basics you’ll need to understand before you can address performance issues.

Oracle database performance tuning has been extensively documented in the Oracle community. Numerous books provide detailed and excellent information. 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 issues. This understanding will help you implement the tuning procedures most suited for your own particular implementation scenario. Where appropriate, we’ll provide some basic tuning guidelines.

Performance Tuning Basics

Database performance is one of the trickiest aspects of the operation of your database. One of the curious aspects of performance is that “good performance” is defined by its absence rather than by its presence. You can usually recognize bad performance easily, but good performance is more likely the absence of bad performance. Performance is simultaneously a very simple topic—any novice user can implicitly understand it—and an extremely complex topic that ...