This book is about tuning Oracle databases. Three areas of Oracle Database tuning are data model tuning, SQL code tuning plus physical, and configuration tuning. The author began his career as an applications developer and not 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 Database tuning. Currently there is no title on the market completely covering all of these. This book will cover all three by explaining both problem detection and resolution.
The approach in this book is to present something which 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; sometimes even very large amounts of data. After all, if your production database needs tuning, you probably have more data than you first expected. This book is written from not only an applications perspective but from the expert knowledge of the author, both in development and database administration roles.
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 will target both developers and database administrators since it includes all three areas essential to tuning Oracle installations effectively. The important factor is that all tuning skills are required for best performance, both administration and development skills sets.
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. There are no existing titles including tuning for data models, tuning of SQL code plus physical and configuration tuning, all in one book.
People who would benefit from reading this book would be 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 no SQL code tuning is ever done and too much time is spent squeezing out an extra 10% of performance, with the database administrator 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.
