Optimizing Oracle Performance: A Practitioner's Guide to Optimizing Response Time

Oracle system performance inefficiencies often go undetected for months or even years--even under intense scrutiny--because traditional Oracle performance analysis methods and tools are fundamentally flawed. They're unreliable and inefficient. Oracle DBAs and developers are all too familiar with the outlay of time and resources, blown budgets, missed deadlines, and marginally effective performance fiddling that is commonplace with traditional methods of Oracle performance tuning. In this crucial book, Cary Millsap, former VP of Oracle's System Performance Group, clearly and concisely explains how to use Oracle's response time statistics to diagnose and repair performance problems. Cary also shows how "queueing theory" can be applied to response time statistics to predict the impact of upgrades and other system changes. Optimizing Oracle Performance eliminates the time-consuming, trial-and-error guesswork inherent in most conventional approaches to tuning. You can determine exactly where a system's performance problem is, and with equal importance, where it is not, in just a few minutes--even if the problem is several years old. Optimizing Oracle Performance cuts a path through the complexity of current tuning methods, and streamlines an approach that focuses on optimization techniques that any DBA can use quickly and successfully to make noticeable--even dramatic--improvements. For example, the one thing database users care most about is response time. Naturally, DBAs focus much of their time and effort towards improving response time. But it is entirely too easy to spend hundreds of hours to improve important system metrics such as hit ratios, average latencies, and wait times, only to find users are unable to perceive the difference. And an expensive hardware upgrade may not help either. It doesn't have to be that way. Technological advances have added impact, efficiency, measurability, predictive capacity, reliability, speed, and practicality to the science of Oracle performance optimization. Optimizing Oracle Performance shows you how to slash the frustration and expense associated with unraveling the true root cause of any type of performance problem, and reliably predict future performance. The price of this essential book will be paid back in hours saved the first time its methods are used.

Cary Millsap is the former Vice President of Oracle's System Performance Group and the cofounder of Hotsos, a company dedicated to Oracle system performance. Hotsos provides performance-improvement tools for Oracle environments and also delivers training in the form of clinics and symposiums. Cary is also a founding member of the Oak Table Network (http://www.oaktable.net), an informal association of "Oracle Scientists" well known throughout the Oracle community.

Jeff Holt is one of the world's most productive Oracle performance optimization specialists. He has tremendous experience in constructing training programs and software tools to optimize the system performance management process. He is a former support analyst and consultant at Oracle Corporation, where he served as a technology leader in the System Performance Group. He is the Hotsos Tools lead designer and developer, the author of several technical papers, a Hotsos founding employee, and a Hotsos Clinic principal developer.