What This Book Is and Is Not | Optimizing Oracle Performance

This book is different from any other book about Oracle performance on the market. It is not a book of tips and techniques. It is a book dedicated to helping you remove performance pain faster and more completely than you've ever thought possible. I believe that doing this, however, requires a book that will change your whole mindset about performance.

This book describes a method for optimizing the performance of an Oracle system, but it goes an important step further. The method prescribed in this book optimizes the performance of the whole performance improvement project . The goal of this book is not to make one system faster; it is to make you faster and more efficient at optimizing any system.

This book focuses more completely upon performance problem diagnosis than upon repair tasks . In my experience, diagnosis is where people usually mess up. There are lots of experts out there responding sensibly to poorly collected diagnostic data in poorly specified projects. It is usually easy to solve a problem when it is presented to you correctly. It can be impossible to solve the right problem when you're focused on the wrong problem. This book contains many examples of working on the wrong problem, and it explains how never to make that mistake again.

This is not a book about system management or capacity planning, although almost all the information in this book is relevant to the system manager's and capacity planner's job. It is not a compendium of all the Oracle "wait events." I cover the events that we have encountered most frequently in the hundreds of trace files we've analyzed , but I leave detailed treatment of each event to other sources, such as you might find on the Internet. I use google.com as my primary source of information about wait event definitions. Authors are continually adding to the Internet repertory of detailed information about the wait events.

Finally, this is a book for the performance optimization practitioner . It's not a book of theories . Every piece of information in this book is included because my students, my colleagues, and I need to have the information available to do our jobs of improving Oracle performance.

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