The Art and Science of Oracle Performance Tuning [ILLUSTRATED] (Paperback)

by Christopher Lawson (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
The Art and Science of Oracle Performance Tuning:

Complete and approachable guide to tuning best practice
For novice to intermediate Oracle DBAs and developers

Solving or planning for performance issues is a core part of the database professional's toolkit. The Oracle database is very flexible, making it suitable for a wide range of applications. Consequently, it is highly tunable, presenting a bewildering set of choices to the inexperienced. Tuning Oracle is as much about approach as about understanding the technology. It is more than tweaking parameters, or following a set prescription – it involves matching application-specific knowledge with what's happening inside the database.

Based on the author's long experience working with Oracle, the book uses a five-step model to help identify and isolate the cause of non-performance. This book shows you how to approach problems, get the information you need from Oracle, and follow the process through to success.

The Art and Science of Oracle Performance Tuning shows you:

A proven process for performance tuning
How to objectively categorize the problem
The human and business aspects of tuning as well as the technical know-how
How to trace problems to their root cause
Analyzing the cost of SQL statements
Gathering statistics – achieving quantifiable results
Devising and testing a solution
Case studies throughout illustrate key points

Curlingstone is a new imprint providing practical information on all aspects of the technology, techniques, and job roles that form the database community.

About the Author
Christopher Lawson is an independent consultant who specializes in performance tuning of data warehouse and financial applications. His articles on database management and performance tuning have appeared in numerous technical journals, and he is a frequent speaker at Oracle conferences. When he isn’t tracking down elusive performance problems, Chris teaches courses on enterprise database systems for the University of Phoenix.Chris earned his bachelor’s and M.B.A. degrees at the University of California, Irvine. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 459 pages
• Publisher: Curlingstone; illustrated edition edition (January 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1904347010
• ISBN-13: 978-1904347019
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,464,314 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Practical guide to Oracle performance tuning, March 9, 2003

By	Sten C. Rognes (San Francisco,CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Christopher Lawson certainly masters the art of writing a very readable technical book. This is an outstanding book by an author with a lot of experience in the field who's taken the time to produce extensive examples.

Lawson makes several good points in his book that I wish beginner and "expert" DBAs would adopt: 1. No performance tuning tool can compensate for the lack of understanding of the Oracle database server. 2. Performance problems are usually not solved by changing int.ora parameteres and looking at cache hit ratios. 3. Learn how to use Oracle's wait event interface and you are very likely to identify your database bottleneck. 4. Understand SQL join techniques and how to read an execution plan and you'll become the Oracle Magician.

For the beginner DBA this is an excellent book to start with. The book is not a guide to new Oracle features; Oracle's own free documentation is where you should look for this. Get this book and accelerate you Oracle DBA career !

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Something New in the Realm of Oracle Optimization Books, March 14, 2003

By	Christopher J. Gait (Nokesville, VA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

... This book is a must have for Oracle optimization specialists. Though geared mainly for the beginning-to-intermediate tuner, there is much useful information and food for thought to be found here for the more experienced specialist. The author stresses the importance of using wait events for optimizing, not the superannuated ratio-based approach.

This book helps the reader get away from bad optimization habits. Medical diagnosis is often used as a metaphor for the process, and Lawson often uses this (and other useful metaphors) in the book. Although he doesn't use the phrase, his book follows an old diagnostics adage: "When you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras." In other words, if you have latching problems, don't start pursuing what underscore parameters you can change, look to the prosaic root of the problem (almost inevitably to be found in bad design and bad SQL, and once in a while skimpy or dodgy hardware).

There is often a temptation to fling yourself at one technical problem after another on a system, hoping that the effort will magically solve the problem along the way. Lawson sets a step-by-step framework for working with the technical problem, the business situation, and most importantly, the people involved.

Many people in our industry are convinced that you can gather a few ratios and run a few scripts and find out everything you need to optimize a system. Occasionally this is true. But in the vast majority of cases you can gather at least as much information from the junior DBA you talk to at lunch about 'why the system is really like that' than you get from Statspack and your CD of scripts. More importantly, people can tell you what is important to their business, what plans they have for the system, and what areas are their strong and weak points. A lot of engineers (and optimization is a field dominated by the engineering mindset) have no problems setting up elaborate instrumentation on a system under study, gathering data and transforming that data into a good, objective report. That's the 'science' part of the work, and Lawson shows you a lot of fast, down-and-dirty scripts that can help you do just that. But he also devotes several chapters to the 'art' of optimization, a realm that is often alien to the engineering approach. Here the black and white answers obtained from studying the database and its various subsystems encounter the harsh reality of human frailty and financial sensibilities. This part of tuning requires people skills more than any other aspect of the RDBMS industry with the possible exception of sales. Tuning assignments are often a matter of reconciling the angry with the clueless, and improving a system in spite of the owners' best efforts to keep it in a hosed state.

This book is clearly based on years of experience and observation, and will be a good resource for years to come. There are a few anachronistic moments and places that could benefit from 'the latest toys', but overall the book is up-to-date (examples of the former are the use of 'UNRECOVERABLE' instead of 'NOLOGGING' in a piece of syntax and the stress on ordering table joins rather than cajoling the optimizer into doing the job better. The latter shows up in such lapses as having no mention of the incredibly useful v$SQL_PLAN table in 9i).

I heartily recommend this book.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best Oracle Tuning book so far!, March 14, 2003

By	Dennis W. Willaims (Minneapolis, MN United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book has the following strengths:
1. It is comprehensive, covering all aspects of Oracle Tuning.
2. New to Oracle tuning? This book will start you off right. It starts by covering how to approach tuning. Oracle is a very complex system and you can spend a lot of time on the wrong approach.
3. Experienced Oracle tuner? All the latest concepts like the Oracle Wait Facility are covered.
4. Very few books describe in detail how to tune SQL statements themselves. That is probably the strongest point of this book.
5. Very readable. I found myself unable to put the book down. Lawson includes a wealth of real-world experiences that add credibility to his suggestions.