Description:
Advanced performance tuning with Oracle involves unraveling the mysteries of the SQL database's inner workings. Oracle8i Internal Services for Waits, Latches, Locks, and Memory peels back several layers of the Oracle onion to reveal how things really work. While the author claims his quest to get to the bottom of Oracle still continues, this book is a snapshot of his current knowledge of the performance-critical internals. The book's title tells the whole story about its content. It focuses on waits, latches, locks, and memory allocation because they have a dramatic effect on overall performance. Each of these topics is presented separately, with explanations of how each works under the hood and what can be done to optimize it. Although the title offers plenty of architectural explanation, a solid foundation into Oracle 8i release 8.1 (the version addressed by the author) is a prerequisite for understanding this text. The presentation includes few diagrams. Instead, the author makes a special effort to list relevant Oracle parameters and their descriptions in tables, as well as examples of statistics that can be used in optimization. This is a guide for advanced administrators already on a solid footing with Oracle8i and offers plenty of insight into the crucial undocumented aspects of the relational database. --Stephen W. Plain
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