Customer Reviews

The Art and Science of Oracle Performance Tuning

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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 !

... 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.

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.

The Art and Science of Oracle performance tuning is a surprisingly unique Oracle book. Rather than focusing on technical scripts and remedies, Chris Lawson takes the approach of the Oracle detective, packing this book with insights and techniques in order to diagnose the root causes of Oracle performance problems. Throughout the text, Lawson shares investigative techniques that are extremely helpful in locating the root causes of all sorts of performance tuning problems. Especially useful are Lawson's sections on SQL tuning and PGA memory management. Overall, this is a surprisingly comprehensive book that focuses on the approach to be taken by the Oracle tuning expert to quickly and efficiently identifying the causes of Oracle performance problems.

DBAs like me are a harried lot. Especially when the company's resources are highly dependant on the database servers. Security, Availability and most importantly Performance are the words that spring to mind.

It is in this context, that DBAs have to keep their databases well oiled and finely tuned. It is definitely a science that has well laid out rules and approaches, which if well documented and followed, yeild superior results.

What seems to be missed out of most other books on the same topic is the Art of performance tuning. The art aspect of it is basically more subjective and this is where this book scores above the rest in explaining the human side to dealing with databases (it even has a chapter on Dealing with Humans!).

On a more serious note, this is a skill that several DBAs miss out and regret. The experience of the author oozes out of the book as he explains each performance scenario and most common solutions. For Example, the chapters on Analysing SQL bottlenecks and SQL joins overflow with practical insight. Ample case studies help the reader to grasp the situation better.

All in all, this is an excellent read for all Oracle DBA (and aspiring ones too!).

Lawson gives the Oracle DBA many useful ideas on customising your Oracle database. He pretty much assumes you already possess a reasonable background in Oracle. There is no wasted space on elementary SQL or Oracle tasks.

Perhaps the key chapters are 7, "Oracle Pathologist" and 8, "Analysing SQL Bottlenecks". Later chapters add important refinements. But if you are in search of quick gains, chapters 7 and 8 could be the most fruitful. The ideas in those might not have to involve a major overhaul of your architecture.

Christopher Lawson is a new name to me, but on the basis of this book his is a name worth looking out for.

This book shows how taking a simple approach to performance tuning, allied with common sense and an understanding of what oracle is doing, leads to clear documentable and repeatable performance improvement. There is no magic bullet, but most performance issues are straightfoward to identify and resolve.

This book is a great place to start to learn about performance tuning for Oracle. The book covers the different type of performance tuning methods in a neutral and matter of fact manner. I like the candidness of the author and the fact that he does not push or suggest one method is better than any other. Use this book to start to understand the different methods then move on to more in depth books on a particular performance tuning method. Take a moment and look at the Table of Contents

The technical Oracle performance tuning section doesn't start until Chapter 5. The first 94 pages of the book is spent on topics such as "Maintain a Healthy Skepticism","Blame should be Avoided","The Cost of a Poor Working Relationship", and "The Universal Law of Reciprocity". Although the author's advice on these matters is sound, the first 94 pages clearly does not provide what the users are looking for.

The crown jewel of this book is its technical explaination of wait events. Its explaination of v$SQL, v$system_event, v$session_event, and V$Session_wait tables is well worth your money and your time. If you do not know of these tables, then do yourself and your Oracle users a great service and buy this book and master its contents. You will not regret it.

The weakspot of this book is in the resolution of Oracle's slow performance. Although the book provides strong hints that most Oracle issues can be resolved with better indexing and index hints, the book does not emphasize it as much as it should. It also doesn't provide a whole lot of suggestions on how to optimize the SGA.

This is not a highly technical Oracle book but it does demonstrate how many of the Oracle features rely on intuition instead of science. It is not the kind of book that you will refer to later, but it is an excellent one time read