Acknowledgments

I owe my parents, Lois and Philip, scientists both, for the example they set in all aspects of their lives. My thesis advisor, Dale Rudd, showed me the highest example of keeping both eyes on the big picture, never missing an opportunity to solve the real, underlying problem for having too-narrowly defined a problem for immediate attack. My brother Bruce paved my way to relational databases and has always shared his knowledge generously.

My former manager Roy Camblin, who was CIO of Oracle at the time, pushed me to find a simple set of rules to teach SQL tuning, when I didn't know such rules myself . The rules are not so simple, but, to paraphrase Einstein, they are as simple as they can be. Oracle gave me the liberty to develop the rules in depth, and TenFold Corporation gave me the opportunity to see firsthand how well they applied across all relational databases. TenFold Corporation further provided generous access to test databases to verify the vendor-specific behavior that I describe in this book.

I owe a special debt of gratitude to Jonathan Gennick, the editor of this book. Jonathan lent his expert hand at all levels, catching technical glitches, correcting the organization of the material when needed, and simply making the language work. His excellent , patient, and well-explained feedback not only made this a much better book, but also made me a much better writer by the end.

Taj Johnson, David Ozenne, Dave Hunt, Alexei Chadovich, and Jeff Walker provided generous and valuable technical assistance ”thank you all! For generous help to get the technical content right, I give special thanks to my two technical reviewers, both excellent and experienced practitioners , Virag Saksena and Alan Beaulieu. Any mistakes that remain are all mine, of course.

Since this book is more than just words on pages, I thank the skillful staff at O'Reilly and Associates: Brian Sawyer, the production editor and copyeditor; Robert Romano and Jessamyn Read, the very patient illustrators; Ellie Volckhausen, the cover designer; Melanie Wang, the interior designer; Julie Hawks, who converted the files; Matt Hutchinson, the proofreader; Darren Kelly and Claire Cloutier, who provided quality control; and Angela Howard, the indexer.

Finally, I owe my wife, Parva, and my children, Tira and Abe, for their endless patience and faith in me, and for giving me the best of reasons to achieve all that I can.