Audience for This Book

I wrote this book for anyone who already knows SQL but, at least sometimes, needs to find ways to make SQL run faster. Traditionally, the same people who write the SQL in the first place, the application developers, do most SQL tuning. Certainly, I hope this book helps developers solve their own tuning problems, especially the most common types of problems. However, from my own experience as a tuning specialist, I find that it is at least equally efficient to tune other people's SQL. Fortunately, SQL provides a clear spec for which rows an application requires at a given point, and you needn't have any application-specific knowledge at all to determine a faster path to reach those same rows. Since the tuner needs no knowledge of the application, it is easy to tune SQL written by other people, and a specialist has the opportunity to learn to tune more efficiently than any nonspecialist could, especially when dealing with the hardest problems.