Summary

This chapter has introduced you to the world of performance tuning. Performance tuning is such a huge topic that it requires a book for itself. In this chapter we have learned basic SQL tracing using the autotrace utility. When you are requested to investigate a poorly performing SQL statement, you will find Explain Plan to be very helpful and it is one of the starting points in the tuning process. We have also explored different types of indexes in this chapter. STATSPACK reports the overall health of the database. If used correctly it helps solve many of the performance tuning issues related to database memory configuration, I/O configuration, bad performing SQL statements, and so on.