Preface

People use databases to organize and to manage their data. Oracle Database is the leader in the relational database management systems market, with a broad adoption in many industries. Using the best tool is not enough to be sure that the results of our efforts will be satisfactory—driving the fastest car in a Formula 1 competition, though better than driving the slowest, doesn’t guarantee the first place at the checkered flag.

Every developer—and every manager—knows that applications have to be responsive, because users hate to spend their time waiting for a transaction to end, looking at an hourglass. To meet this goal, it’s important to adopt a correct tuning strategy, which starts at the same time as the application design, then moves forward together, and will continue even when the application and the database are in production.

Even though this is a cookbook on performance tuning, there are no silver bullets. Every recipe in this book will show us how to solve a problem with the correct approach, so when a similar problem arises in one of our databases, we can apply the correct solution even in different situations than the ones presented in the book.

Before we start a database performance tuning process, we have to define what the tuning goals that we aim to reach are. "As fast as possible" is not a tuning goal. The primary tuning goal, generally speaking, is to reduce the response time or to reduce the resources needed to do a certain amount of work in the same time.

At a lower level, to minimize response time we will try to:

• Reduce or eliminate waits

• Cache the largest number of blocks in memory

• Access the least number of data blocks (from disks)

To increase the throughput and availability we will try to:

• Increment hit ratios

• Decrease system memory utilization

• Eliminate paging and swapping

• Reduce recovery time, decreasing the Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR)

• Increase load balancing (distributing data files to different disks) to reduce I/O times

• Increase scalability

Before starting a tuning session, we have to define which are the goals, in terms of SLA, or define precise and measurable objectives. So at the end of the tuning process, we will know if we have reached the expected results. We will work to reduce the workload—so the same task will consume less resources, allowing other tasks to use those resources—and to minimize the response time.

In this book, we will find many recipes that can help us reach these goals. Have a good read!

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Starting with Performance Tuning will show how to set up the example database, how to adopt a performance tuning process that can help in solving performance problems, and how to collect and analyze data from Oracle Database using various methods.

Chapter 2, Optimizing Application Design presents the most common application design issues that prevent an application from running without performance issues. You will see how to improve database performance by sharing reusable code and by reducing the number of requests to the database by using various database objects.

Chapter 3, Optimizing Storage Structures will show how to optimize the use of different database storage structures, presenting the optimal use for tables, clusters, indexes, and partitioning. You will see how to choose the appropriate structure to improve access time to your data, also analyzing the possible drawbacks in the operations that modify the data.

Chapter 4, Optimizing SQL Code is focused on SQL code optimization. Throughout the chapter you will find many methods to diagnose and solve typical performance problems caused by poorly written SQL code. You will find answers on how (and when) to avoid full table scans, how to use indexes, bulk operations and arrays, join and subquery optimization. You will also see how to trace SQL activity to diagnose problems.

Chapter 5, Optimizing Sort Operations will show the importance of optimizing sort operations to achieve better performance even when you don’t see any explicit sort operations in your SQL code. In this chapter, we will see the difference between in-memory and on-disk sort, how an index can improve the performance by reducing or avoiding sort operations, how to perform top-n queries, and how to use aggregate functions, and the use of set operations.

Chapter 6, Optimizing PL/SQL Code will show how to optimize PL/SQL code in stored procedures, triggers, and user-defined functions. You will see the advantages of using bulk-collect and array processing, native compilation and function result cache.

Chapter 7, Improving the Oracle Optimizer is focused on how to help the Oracle Optimizer in choosing the best execution plan using various tools, tricks, and tips, to obtain better performance. You will see the use of hints, statistics, histograms, stored outlines, adaptive cursor sharing, SQL tuning sets, and SQL baselines.

Chapter 8, Other Optimizations will show how to use Client Side Result Cache, parallel SQL, CREATE TABLE AS SELECT, and direct path inserting to optimize performance in both queries and DML operations. You will also see how to use SQL*Loader and Data Pump to load data into your Oracle Database.

Chapter 9, Tuning Memory will show how to avoid different memory-related issues, starting with Operating System paging. You will learn how to properly configure the library cache, the shared pool, the Program Global Area (PGA), the User Global Area (UGA), and the database buffer cache.

Chapter 10, Tuning I/O will focus on how to optimize the I/O, learning how to distribute Oracle files and stripe objects on different disks, what RAID level is better for each type of database files. The use of asynchronous I/O, checkpoint and redo logs tuning are also discussed in this chapter.

Chapter 11, Tuning Contention will show how to prevent, detect, and tune contention-related issues. You will see both lock and latch contention, why they occur, and how to prevent and solve any issue related to concurrency and contention in your database.

In Appendix A, Dynamic Performance Views you will find a list of the most used dynamic performance views; for each view you will find a brief description and a list of the most useful fields of the view, to be used as a reference in your daily work.

In Appendix B, A Summary of Oracle Packages Used for Performance Tuning you will find a brief summary of Oracle supplied packages useful in order to solve performance-related problems.

What you need for this book

You need an Oracle Database 11gR2 instance available on your system; you can download Oracle Software from Oracle Technology Network at the following site:

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/enterprise-edition/downloads/index.html

In Chapter 1 there is a recipe on how to set up the example database to follow the recipes in this book and to use the code presented.

Who this book is for

This book is aimed at software developers, software and data architects, and DBAs who are beginning to use the Oracle Database, and want to solve performance problems faster and in a rigorous way.

If you are an architect who wants to design fast performing applications, a DBA who is keen to dig into the causes of performance issues, or a developer who wants to learn why and where the application is running slowly this book will provide a good start for your career in performance tuning.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: "Drop the MYSTATS table."

A block of code is set as follows:

SELECT 
  C.CUST_FIRST_NAME, C.CUST_LAST_NAME
FROM sh.CUSTOMERS C
WHERE C.CUST_YEAR_OF_BIRTH = 1949;

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

SELECT 
  C.CUST_FIRST_NAME, C.CUST_LAST_NAME
FROM sh.CUSTOMERS C
WHERE C.CUST_YEAR_OF_BIRTH = 1949;

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

CONNECT sh@TESTDB/sh

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "From Oracle database 9iR2 onwards, Dynamic Sampling was introduced."

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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