Chapter 6. Tuning the Persistence Layer

Data persistence is a key ingredient of any enterprise application, and it has been a part of JDK since its very first release. Most readers certainly agree that data persistence is the most common cause of bottlenecks in applications. Unfortunately, isolating the root of the problem is not a straightforward affair and requires investigating areas from the SQL code to the interfaces used to issue SQL statements. Other potential areas that may affect your data persistence are the database configuration and the underlying network and database hardware.

For this reason, we have divided this chapter into the following three main sections in order to cover all the major factors that can drag down the performance of your data persistence:

• The first section introduces some principles of good database design. If your database design doesn't conform to some commonly agreed rules, chances are high that you will find it hard to achieve the performance...