Chapter 9. Caching to Improve Performance

Performance optimization is an immortal challenge in Oracle applications which demands sound essentials of a DBA and logical abilities of a developer. Every release of Oracle promises for new features to enhance the performance and scalability of an application.

In the last chapter, we saw the difference made by real native compilation and intra unit inlining. Another innovation was brought to notice in Oracle 11g and it was data caching. Data caching is a common feature to improvise upon the application performance. In the past, the architectural implementation of caching used to cache the data sets in the SGA buffer cache, but not the SQL with results. Oracle 11g presents a concrete effective feature which can restore the results in a dedicated component of SGA. It is not like the traditional features which boost performance but it is an alternate approach to yield better performance.

In simple terms, the result of an operation will be temporarily...