Optimizing Oracle Performance Book Review

A Practitioner’s Guide to Optimizing Response Time

Optimising Oracle Performance is a book that takes you through a very detailed look at how to increase the performance of your Oracle database. This is not a book for the half hearted person who wants to find out the best way to improve performance.

Optimising Oracle Performance is a very technical book for database administrators and the book contains a lot of scientific calculations which can allow you to discover your database problems by analysing database stats and then acting upon those stats.

Optimising Oracle Performance is split into three main sections, Method, Reference and Deployment. Method takes you through finding out about the problems you have with your database and how to deal with them. Reference takes you through a number of data gathering methods, including working with the trace files, Oracle kernel timings, looking at fixed view data and the deficiencies of it and it discusses queueing theory. Deployment discusses how to forecast your databases improvements, working with resource profiles, and how to minimise the number of calls to the database.

The final chapter of Optimising Oracle Performance includes a number of real Case Studies. The case studies are very good as they demonstrate a number of database problems, and what areas of the database to target and how to diagnose and respond to the discovered problem, whilst summing up what problems have been learnt.

The overall used method of optimising Oracle in Optimising Oracle Performance includes targetting a user action that the business most needs to optimise. Collect scoped extended SQL trace data covering the user action, then use this trace data to identify where and why the response time for the action is being consumed. Finally use the output to determine the performance improvement activity that will have the greatest impact on the response time for the action in question.

Overall Optimising Oracle Performance is a very good book, but is very detailed and should prove a useful read to all professional DBAs.