Re: Cary Millsap's Optimizing Oracle Performance

Ben wrote:
> Is not for the faint of heart. My Lord, I am just in over my head with
> trying to understand chapter 9. It's just too overwhelming to grasp on
> the initial read.
>
> Am I the only one that feels this way? I mean, you have a to be a
> master of Quantitative Theory to understand some of that stuff.
>
> I am really curious as to if all you masters of Performance Tuning
> really use all of the theories he covers. I guess they would become
> second nature, but it just seems overwhelming.
>
> I do appreciate the wealth of information in the book though, it has
> educated me further in the complexity of performance tuning and how
> much I don't think that I'll ever be able to fully understand the
> concepts behind it. Thank you Mr. Millsap. I'm hoping that there is a
> chapter 9.b that will say, "Just kidding, all you really have to do is
> this...."

Yes the book is can be overwhelming the first time you read it. Many very experienced oracle professionals struggle with it. It's not an easy read.

The premise of the book though is absolutely fulfilled ... what premise? That Optimizing Oracle Performance is for the most part a solved problem.

That's good enough news to make reading the book a second time, a third time, a fourth time etc well worth it. I have lost track of how many times I have read it pretty much cover to cover. At least 6 times.

The chapters that you struggle with the most you can skim as long as you plan on re-reading them again ( and again ).

If you know that you can get a good trace that has the details that you need and you have some tools ( tkprof or orasrp or the hotsos resource profiler ) then really theoretically you can skip or drastically skim all the chapters in the technical reference part ( chapters 5 thru 9 ).  Basically Cary proves a lot of things in that area.

Read part 1 and part 3 a couple of times chapter by chapter then come back to the part 2 eventually is one approach. Received on Wed Sep 13 2006 - 16:34:20 CDT