Chapter 12. Tuning Oracle Database 11g XE

People with clear, written goals, accomplish far more in a shorter period of time than people without them could ever imagine. - Brian Tracy

This chapter is dedicated to database tuning. We will discuss various best practices in designing database applications and different techniques of tuning the overall database. The objective of this chapter is to provide a basic foundation in performance tuning. A complete tuning solution is out of the scope of this book. We will briefly discuss the following topics in this chapter:

• Performance tuning

• Performance tuning approach

• Avoiding common pitfalls

• Autotrace utility

• Explain Plan

• Using indexes

• Dynamic performance views

• Statspack

Performance tuning

Tuning is a process of identifying and resolving the cause of slow performing piece of program code. One of the important duties of a database administrator is to ensure that the Oracle database is tuned properly. Tuning is an iterative process. Resolving the first bottleneck...