What is Required when Tuning Oracle Database?

• Good software tools.

• Skilled personnel.

• Staging (testing) environments.

• A realistic duplication of the production environment.

  • Actual and expected production environments. These can often be different if growth is rapid or requirements change.

  • If possible databases should be of the same size and content. If this is impractical then at least development and testing databases should be proportionate to production.

  • Are the statistics the same? Statistics can be copied or executed using the same time intervals as production.

What Tools are Available?

Excellent software tools for tuning and monitoring Oracle databases are numerous. Oracle Enterprise Manager has many very useful bells and whistles. Spotlight is excellent for visual and informative real- time monitoring of busy production systems. Both Oracle Enterprise Manager and Spotlight are very useful as tuning aids for both physical and SQL code performance analysis.

There are many other tools available. The most important tools in the tuning process are the developers and the administrators. That is why you are reading this book. The best software tools are usually the most expensive but that does not mean that the less expensive tools are useless. In general, the more expensive tools tend to do more for you. However, when something is being...