Chapter 8. 11g Tuning Tools

Here we are, at the last chapter of this book. It is intended to be the culmination of all the knowledge from the previous chapters. What this chapter provides is details on how to start tuning as a DBA—what is most important to know, how to find that information, and what tools are provided in 11g for preventing and resolving performance issues. The new SQL Plan Management features are covered, along with a recommended migration path for upgrading the query optimizer while keeping performance disruptions to a minimum.

There are two components to tuning: proactive and reactive. Proactive tuning includes an assessment of the current conditions—end user response time, server resources, automatic or manual tuning jobs, and startup initialization parameters. Reactive tuning includes continued assessment after adjusting resources, whether they are server, network, or database-based. Expect this chapter to just be a quick introduction to tuning, as entire books are dedicated...