Expert Oracle SQL

Foreword

When Jonathan Gennick from Apress approached me with a request to write the foreword for this book, I said yes without thinking for too long, as I already knew the quality of Tony’s work. He has a good, practical approach to understanding and fixing Oracle problems and for optimizing inefficient code.

Optimizing SQL performance is not always about providing more-detailed optimizer statistics for faster execution plans. Sometimes you want to provide less-detailed information to the cost-based optimizer and freeze the statistics to achieve better stability in SQL performance. Such an approach may initially sound counterintuitive and off the mainstream, but it can avoid headaches and midnight phone calls later if SQL plan stability is important ...