Customer Reviews

Oracle High-Performance SQL Tuning

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I'm sure that this was a great book in it's day, but it is 5 years old and useful only for firewood. The rule optimizer is not even there anymore. [...]

After having tuned our server, network, and database it was clear that the remaining slow performance was due to the SQL.
This led me to the purchase of this book which has not disapointed. This book goes into great detail about how sql statements effect database performance and how to correct it.
After just the first few chapters, I was able to quickly find 'hot' sql statements and see how they were causing bad performance due to full table scans, merge joins, slow index scans, hints, built in functions, sorting etc. This book gives a good explanation to the various table / index access methods and thus improved my ability to look at an explain plan and quickly see problem areas. With this book I have better understanding of the options to correct them without messing with the sql code. Infact, most all of these are correctable without changing the sql code - my favorite part.
There is of course a lot written on tuning to the code that can make great strides in performance as well, but as a dba and not a developer, I was more focused on things I could do to improve performance without changing the code.

The scrips with the book are especially good - pull sql out of the library cache on the fly, or out of statspack tables for hisorical analysis - and get reports on full table scans, various index scan reports, etc. These alone make the usefulness of this book fast and easy - worth it.

In short, I recomend this book to anyone wanting a better understanding of how sql code is affecting your DB performance as well as options to correct it. This is good if you have applications where you can't change the code (or just don't want to) but see improvements in performance need be made.

The book never go deep into sql even the author promised to do so, it is not a step-by-step guild that dbas can follow, and the seasoned dba also do not need this book because of nothing new.
You can see some obvious mistake in this book, for example, about the hash join, Mr. Burleson told us in the page 67 and page 391 that the hash table probe the large table, but oracle document said large table probes the hash table.

I hope to see some detail about the analyse of execution plan of table join and scenario, but there is none.

Although a little outdated, this book is very valuable in what its sells: performance SQL tuning. It explains clearly with a lot of examples and very helpful hints. If you are trying to get to know how to tune SQL queries, get this book.

Still working my way through it, but have already gleaned several insights from it. This gives me information I had not yet found in Oracle manuals. (I'm an application developer, trying to work productively with database administrators and system administrators.)

I have a very complex system with lots of subqueries, and I was unable to find good tuning information until I tried the techniques in this book.

The book is simple to understand and explains the internals of complex Oracle SQL operations.

I have been very heppy with the results from my tuning, and I am thankful to find this textbook.

It is a good book for those interested in the internals of sql. The knowledge of the author about the matter is excellent, and his writing style is clear, simple, and funny.

I bought a copy of this book in hopes of tuning the SQL in my Oracle8i database and I was not disappointed. When using the techniques in the book, I was able to quickly identify and tune the most resource intensive SQL statements in my system. The book is clear and easy to understand.

I bought this book looking for a method to tune all of the SQL in an entire database. Much of the introductory material is self-evident, but the advanced topics are very insightful.

The text has lot's of examples, and clearly show how to find and fix sub-optimal SQL. Especially useful are the scripts to yank the SQL righ out of the library cache for analysis.

Some of the text moves very slowly, but this is expected for a comprehensive book on SQL tuning. This book explains many nuances of cost-based versus rule-based optimization, and the coverage of SQL hints is very good. Overall, this one is a keeper.

I found this book to be exceptionally helpful for tuning SQL at the optimizer level. I was happy to see that the text contains complete explainations of the optimizer modes and the benefits of each. I also liked the technique for analyzing SQL from the library cache, and I have found this book to be very helpful.