Principles of Data Management

PERFORMANCE MONITORING AND TUNING

Database administrators should not wait for users to complain about poor performance; they should be constantly monitoring performance and taking appropriate remedial action to ensure that the users receive a good level of service. Nevertheless, however proactive the database administrators are in identifying potential performance problems and taking action to prevent them, they still need to be ready to respond to unexpected poor performance; no matter how hard you try to prevent it, unplanned poor performance problems are always likely to occur.

Not all performance issues that appear at first sight to be due to poor database performance are in fact caused by the database; there may be more general system performance ...