A FINAL FEW WORDS
I was going to thank my Mum but she can't spell Oracle. I couldn't really tell you where the content for this document came from. I've always had an unhealthy fascination with performance and generally it's been from trial and error, making my own mistakes but most importantly listening and reading.
There are many useful sites and forums on the web where a developer might meet a DBA, a data warehouse developer dealing with terrabytes of data might meet another developer building a home video library as hist first Oracle project.
I really cannot begin to highlight the benefit of being around these chaps while they discuss or argue about their performance problems. He who sits and listens gets stiff knees, but he also learns alot.
As well as gleaning information from the people around you, have a quick check back to the Oracle Documentation every now and then. A good developer and friend of mine recently mentioned that he is often confused by extents and segments. It's not really a developers area but a quick look in the 8.1.7 docs reveals one paragraph which explains the concept without getting too detailed.
Next time you have that feeling, get the docs and take a moment to look. Anyway, enough of that for now, I'm off to read about the extensible optimiser and global hints:-)
Credits
Thanks to Tony Andrews for his technical and readability suggestions.
Resources and Links
Some other places of interest
| www.asktom.oracle.com | Tom Kyte's Oracle forums. Highly recommended. |
| www.dbforums.com | DbForums has an active Oracle forum with a some very experienced and knowledgable guys hanging around. I would recommend it as a place to ask |
| www.oracle.com | It goes without saying that Oracle's site has a wealth of information, white papers and active forums. You can also read Documentation on-line |
| www.google.com | As with any subject, Google groups are probably the first place you'll go to find answers. Someone once said that whatever your question, somebody will have already answered it on Usenet. "If it takes a week to walk a fortnight, how many apples in a barrel of grapes?" proved it was just a myth. |
| www.billmagee.co.uk | Not much about Oracle, but deserves a mention |
| http://pipetalk.quest-pipelines.com/~plsql | Oracle PL/SQL FAQ's and forum |