Authors: Powell, Gavin
Pages: 904
Publisher: Unknow
ISBN13: 9781555583453
This book is about tuning Oracle databases. Three areas of Oracle Data-
base tuning are data model tuning, SQL code tuning, and physical and
configuration tuning. The author began his career as an applications devel-
oper, not as a systems or network administrator. As a result, this book is
written from an applications rather than an operating system perspective.
The objective of this book is to cover all three areas of Oracle data-
base tuning. Currently, no title on the market completely covers all of these
areas. This book will cover all three by explaining both problem detection
and resolution.
The approach in this book is to present something that appears to be
immensely complex in a simplistic and easy-to-understand manner.
Both reference material and examples are utilized appropriately in order to
expedite understanding for the reader.
Reference material is not overused. Oracle software has been in general
use commercially for many years and is intended to provide for a very large
and diverse customer base. Features are often not removed from Oracle
software between versions, and new features are continuously being added.
The result is that Oracle software contains a plethora of available options
and features. Using only reference information to explain Oracle Database
tuning would therefore be difficult to read, contrary to the approach of this
book, and would not provide the reader with much practical advice. This
book contains a lot of examples, with realistic databases and data, some-
times even very large amounts of data. After all, if your production database
needs tuning, you probably have more data than you first expected.
A broad-based tutorial on the subject of tuning Oracle Database is
much needed. Most database administrators have operating system administration experience, and little SQL code or data modeling experience. On the other hand, developers have the opposite. This book targets both developers and database administrators because it includes all three areas essential to tuning Oracle installations effectively. The important factor is that all tuning skills—both administration and development skill sets—are required for best performance.
Being a broad-based tutorial, this title is written to reach the widest possible audience, including data modelers, developers, database administrators, and system administrators. Each of these audiences is very specialized,
but all are related and interdependent. No existing titles include tuning for
data models, tuning of SQL code, and physical and configuration tuning all
in one book.
People who would benefit from reading this book are database administrators, developers, data modelers, systems or network administrators, and technical managers. Technical people with these different skills are often ignorant of the skills of each other. This is a great pity because all skill sets are very much dependent on each other for well-constructed databases and applications. Let’s take a common example situation.
Developers cannot simply hand off SQL code tuning to database administrators when application coding is complete. Database administrators, more
often than not, know absolutely nothing about SQL code tuning. The result is that no SQL code tuning is ever done, and too much time is spent squeezing out an extra 10% of performance, with the database administra-tor doing physical and configuration tuning. Targeting a few hard-hitting SQL statements will probably result in much more than a 10% performance improvement, which is much more productive.