Skip to Content
Oracle Internals: An Introduction
book

Oracle Internals: An Introduction

by Steve Adams
October 1999
Intermediate to advanced
136 pages
4h 15m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.

Overview

This concise book contains detailed information about Oracle internals -- information that's not readily available to Oracle customers. It lays a foundation for advanced performance tuning of the Oracle database. Based on Oracle8i release 8.1, the book describes many of the secrets of Oracle's internal services: data structures, algorithms, and undocumented Oracle system statistics. Main topics include:

  • Waits - how Oracle processes communicate via semaphores, and how to use the Oracle wait statistics to identify the source of performance problems.

  • Latches - how they keep multiple processes from inspecting protected data structures at the same time, and how to examine and control latch behavior and statistics.

  • Locks - how they work with latches to protect data structures (locks allow multiple sessions to share resources in some cases), and how locks affect performance. There is also a detailed discussion of instance locks, which are used in parallel server environments.

  • Memory - how Oracle uses memory (e.g., the various elements of the System Global Area), and how Oracle dynamically allocates and manages memory.

  • Oracle8i Internal Services is aimed especially at administrators and developers who need detailed internal information to do advanced performance tuning. The book will expand your repertoire of tuning solutions and troubleshooting techniques by explaining how you can use Oracle's hidden parameters and undocumented system statistics to best advantage. NOTE: The author has collected the scripts he has developed for tuning and analysis into a toolkit (known as APT, for Advanced Performance Tuning). These scripts access the Oracle X$ tables directly and provide information not otherwise available. The scripts are available to readers for free from the O'Reilly web site.

    Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
    and much more.

    Read now

    Unlock full access

    More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

    AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

    QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
    Julian F.
    Head of Cybersecurity
    QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
    Addison B.
    Field Engineer
    QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
    Amir M.
    Data Platform Tech Lead
    QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
    Mark W.
    Embedded Software Engineer

    You might also like

    Oracle Internals

    Oracle Internals

    Donald K. Burleson
    Oracle PL/SQL for DBAs

    Oracle PL/SQL for DBAs

    Arup Nanda, Steven Feuerstein
    Oracle in a Nutshell

    Oracle in a Nutshell

    Rick Greenwald, David C. Kreines

    Publisher Resources

    ISBN: 156592598XCatalog PageErrata