You Know that Even Good Tools Work Better in Skilled HandsEverybody has heard of sluggish SQL queries, or even whole systems, that a heroic someone improved with small effort. Usually the improvement is small too, so we will avoid extravagant promises. But we will make you the following guarantees .
One accusation that could be leveled, and to which we plead guilty, is that some of our material is ad hoc advice instead of general principles. Of course! There are only a few general principles in DBMS optimization.
Instead of general principals, we will be looking at what can be done with what's likely to be at hand. If we descend sometimes to mere tips and warnings about traps, that's because we've seen over the years that examples of real situations can help people realize what the general rules are. As has often been observed , tips should be based on principles. The DBMSs that we looked at while preparing this book include IBM DB2, Informix, Ingres II, InterBase, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, and Sybase (MS Windows NT versions). Each was installed and tested using the default switches recommended in the vendors ' instructions. To avoid favoring any vendor's idiosyncrasies, all SQL examples in this book are written in ANSI/ISO Standard SQL:1999. Host-language examples are written in C plus ODBC, or Java plus JDBC. Your DBMS is your pal. We won't counsel you to subvert it, be paranoid about it, or insult it by assuming it's stupid. Rather, as you would with a pal, you should try to get to know it better, and help it to help you. |