Chapter 17. Performance

Achieving optimal performance from your Oracle database is an art, not a science. Using the appropriate data structures, ensuring that there are adequate resources available, and leveraging the features of the Oracle database can help you to avoid bottlenecks that reduce the performance of your system.

This chapter provides an overview of some of the tools within an Oracle database that will help you understand how Oracle optimizes performance for its operations. Specifically, this chapter covers:

  • SQL optimization, including types of optimizers and hints

  • EXPLAIN PLAN, TKPROF, and AUTOTRACE, various Oracle utilities that help you to understand how SQL is being optimized

  • UTLBSTAT, UTLESTAT, and Statspack, various statistical packages that help you to collect performance statistics and identify bottlenecks.

Of course, understanding the tools and syntax covered in this chapter is only the beginning; there is much more to achieving the highest possible performance. For more information, consult the Oracle documentation and some of the books available on Oracle internals and performance tuning. (See Appendix E for suggestions).

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