About the Tools, Examples, and Exercises | Optimizing Oracle Performance

I've chosen Perl as the primary demonstration programming language for this book. It may seem odd that a book about Oracle doesn't use SQL or PL/SQL as a demonstration language, but once you begin reading you'll begin to understand. A lot of this book isn't about Oracle, it's about performance , and the issues of performance are much broader than the SQL and PL/SQL languages are capable of handling elegantly. Perl allows me to illustrate realistic experiments using a free, portable tool that is simple to install. I hope that this choice will maximize the probability that you will actually try some of the experiments that I describe.

I've chosen Microsoft Visual Basic as the demonstration programming language for some of the queueing theory material because Microsoft Excel is the de facto workbook software today. Again, I hope that this choice will maximize the probability that you will actually use the material I'm offering here.

You can download all the listings in this book at the following URL:

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/optoraclep/

This book contains exercises. This is unusual both for an O'Reilly book, and for a book about Oracle. I use exercises for the following reasons:

To encourage you to try exactly what you've just read.
To stimulate you to apply things that you've just read, but with different input values.
To stimulate you to apply things that you've just read, but on your own system.
To admit that I don't know the answer to every interesting question out there, but at least I have made it as far as defining the problem. This way, others can better understand that a problem exists, and they can work on solving it only if the economics of their particular situation warrant the effort.
To encourage the use of this book as a textbook in formal education courses. I have been using draft versions of this book very successfully as the text material for my company's Hotsos Clinic 101 (http://www.hotsos.com) since 2002.

Most of the exercises don't have a single correct answer. For the ones that do, check http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/optoraclep for updated solutions.

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