Optimizing Oracle Performance: A Practitioner's Guide to Optimizing Response Time

by Cary Millsap, Jeff Holt

Oracle system performance inefficiencies often go undetected for months or even years--even under intense scrutiny--because traditional Oracle performance analysis methods and tools are fundamentally flawed. They're unreliable and inefficient. Oracle DBAs and developers are all too familiar with the outlay of time and resources, blown budgets, missed deadlines, and marginally effective performance fiddling that is commonplace with traditional methods of Oracle performance tuning. In this crucial book, Cary Millsap, former VP of Oracle's System Performance Group, clearly and concisely explains how to use Oracle's response time statistics to diagnose and repair performance problems. Cary also shows how "queueing theory" can be applied to response time statistics to predict the impact of upgrades and other system changes. Optimizing Oracle Performance eliminates the time-consuming, trial-and-error guesswork inherent in most conventional approaches to tuning. You can determine exactly where a system's performance problem is, and with equal importance, where it is not, in just a few minutes--even if the problem is several years old. Optimizing Oracle Performance cuts a path through the complexity of current tuning methods, and streamlines an approach that focuses on optimization techniques that any DBA can use quickly and successfully to make noticeable--even dramatic--improvements. For example, the one thing database users care most about is response time. Naturally, DBAs focus much of their time and effort towards improving response time. But it is entirely too easy to spend hundreds of hours to improve important system metrics such as hit ratios, average latencies, and wait times, only to find users are unable to perceive the difference. And an expensive hardware upgrade may not help either. It doesn't have to be that way. Technological advances have added impact, efficiency, measurability, predictive capacity, reliability, speed, and practicality to the science of Oracle performance optimization. Optimizing Oracle Performance shows you how to slash the frustration and expense associated with unraveling the true root cause of any type of performance problem, and reliably predict future performance. The price of this essential book will be paid back in hours saved the first time its methods are used.

Genres: Reference

388 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Michael Finocchiaro · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a typically great O'Reilly technical book and a reference for anyone needing to understand Oracle Performance. Cary Millsap is a legend in the field and has created two companies that are major league legends in database tuning, Hotos and Method R. However, his approach is very oriented around deep stats on queries and may or may not be helpful for more generic Oracle issues. I loved the discussion on queue theory and actually recycled it multiple times in the various classes I have given.
Overall, for the Oracle geek, this is an unavoidable masterpiece, but it only covers one particular aspect of Oracle tuning. For a more rounded view, I would recommend the excellent Troubleshooting Oracle Performance by Christian Antognini.

[Corrado Piola · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a "must" for everyone who wants to learn Oracle performance techniques.
I read it a lot of time ago... Ok, this books covers Oracle until 9.2 release, but is still one of my favourite performance books!
Believe me... Read this book! You'll learn so much...