Oracle9i Performance Tuning Tips & Techniques

From Barnes & Noble

Author Richard J. Niemiec was named in 2001 as one of the world’s six Oracle Certified Masters. He knows the subject inside out. And he’s just updated his definitive guide to Oracle tuning, reflecting dozens of new techniques available in Oracle9i.

You name it, Niemiec covers it in depth: indexing, disk I/O and fragmentation, initialization parameters, EXPLAIN, TRACE, TKPROF, query tuning, table joins, even advanced mathematical analysis techniques and patterns interpretation.

With each version of Oracle, more DBAs become aware of the power of V$ views to look deep into the heart of Oracle databases, and more V$ views become available. (There are now 259 of them!) Niemiec’s substantially beefed up his coverage. With some coauthor assistance, he’s also revamped the book’s discussion of X$ tables, which can expose undocumented features and parameters, even preview forthcoming Oracle versions. He’s also nearly doubled his coverage of PL/SQL tuning.

Niemiec is especially passionate about STATSPACK, Oracle’s new replacement for UTLESTAT/UTLBSTAT. You’ll learn how to install it, manage it, run it, and interpret its results for both proactive and reactive tuning. Among the many other additions in this edition: bitmap indexes, locally managed objects, stored outlines, Kalman filtering, and new Linux-specific coverage.

DBAs are among the busiest people we know. They’ll love this book’s end-of-chapter Tips Reviews, which summarize key techniques into quick-access bullet points. Because what good are fast databases if optimizing them takes forever? Bill Camarda

Bill Camarda is a consultant, writer, and web/multimedia content developer. His 15 books include Special Edition Using Word 2000 and Upgrading & Fixing Networks for Dummies, Second Edition.