Chapter 2: Tuning the Environment
In This Chapter
Seeing how to survive system failures
Tuning your recovery and operating systems
Getting the most from your hardware
Introducing new hardware
Understanding multiprocessor environments
Computer systems are subject to all kinds of failures: power failures, hardware failures, operating system failures, application program failures, and even database management system (DBMS) failures. These things happen; you can count on it. The important question you should ask yourself is “What happens when a failure occurs somewhere in my environment?” In critical applications, you don’t want to lose any data, and you don’t want to lose any more time than absolutely necessary.
Failures aside, you want your system to run as efficiently as possible. Inefficiencies can hamper productivity in many ways, sometimes slowing it to a crawl. In dealing with both failures and inefficiencies, the key to optimizing performance is tuning each part of your system. ...
