CHAPTER 8Effective SQL

This was probably the hardest chapter of the book to write. That is not because the material is all that complex. It’s because I know what people want, and I know what can be delivered. What people want is the ten-step process for tuning any query. What can be delivered is knowledge about how queries are processed, which you can use and apply as you develop queries.

If there were a ten-step, or even a million-step, process by which any query (or a large percentage of queries) could be tuned, we would write a program to do it. Sure, there are actually many programs that try to do this, such as Oracle Enterprise Manager with its tuning pack, SQL Navigator, and others. What they do is primarily recommend indexing schemes to ...

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