Sample Tip, Oracle Performance Tuning Expert

This sample tip from Chris's latest book is Wild Tip #4: Pretend Performance is a Matter of Life or Death! The Craziest Tip You Have Ever Seen

I bet this is the craziest tip you have ever seen. Performance tuning requires creativity and innovation. It’s not at all just a routine, drab job—it requires versatility and stepping into different roles. That’s why I like it so much.

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I love it!

Those not truly experienced in tuning tend to trivialize the process, frequently using trite phrases such as “add missing indexes” or “increase buffer cache.” This misunderstanding helps explain why relatively few DBAs become really good at performance tuning—their view of the task is simply too short-sighted. If your solution set comprises only trivial solutions like new indexes, you’re likely not going to excel in this field.

Here’s a tactic I use when I’m faced with an apparently unsolvable performance problem. I imagine that the problem is so critical that people will actually die if I don’t resolve the difficulty.

I imagine that the lives of people are actually in my hands.

 Yes, I admit this is a bizarre idea, but it actually works. If you can temporarily pretend that there are no limits, you’ll be amazed at the variety of solutions you can invent.