Quiz - Whose Answer is it Anyway?

July 4, 2012 It has been several months since I posted my review of the first half of the “Oracle Database 11gR2 Performance Tuning Cookbook” book.  I had planned to post the review for the second half of the book a couple of weeks later, however four months have passed by since that time, and the second [...]

April 22, 2012 (Modified April 24, 2012) I had intended to finish assembling the second half of the “Oracle Database 11gR2 Performance Tuning Cookbook” book review, however my free time that may be dedicated to book reviews has been a bit limited lately (I have a review of another book started, but left untouched for [...]

February 28, 2012 I do not always get as much benefit from the books that I read as the books’ authors probably intended, although the contents of books, whether right or wrong, sometimes help me remember nearly forgotten facts.  Some of the books, for instance “Pro Oracle SQL” describe how to use b*tree indexes to locate rows with [...]

February 26, 2012 (Modified February 27, 2012) I found another interesting quote in the “Oracle Database 11gR2 Performance Tuning Cookbook“, this time related to tables and full table scans.  This quote is found on page 170 of the book: “If we do an FTS [full table scan], database buffers are used to read all the [...]

February 22, 2012 There are some amazing (or just plain interesting) facts to be found about how indexes work in Oracle Database.  One Internet site in particular that has been helpful in my understanding of Oracle indexes is Richard Foote’s blog.  I occasionally see information on the Internet, in the Oracle documentation, in Metalink (My [...]

February 20, 2012 My copy of the ”Oracle Database 11gR2 Performance Tuning Cookbook” arrived from Amazon, and I will say that I like the seven steps for solving performance problems that is found on page 12, although the diagram of the process on page 14 may lead to a condition known as Compulsive Tuning Disorder. I am [...]

February 17, 2012 As I mentioned in a previous blog article, I placed an order for the book “Oracle Database 11gR2 Performance Tuning Cookbook“, mostly because I was curious how the book would compare with the “Oracle Database 11g Performance Tuning Recipes” book (my review of that book was a total of about 35 typewritten pages in [...]

December 2, 2011 An innocent question was asked in an OTN thread regarding the availability of plan stability options in the Standard Edition of Oracle Database.  If we check the documentation for the latest release (11.2.0.x) of Oracle Database, we will find the following statement: “The use of stored outlines is deprecated in Oracle Database 11g [...]

September 21, 2011 I have written a couple of blog articles on the topic of reading 10046 extended SQL trace files.  Some of those blog articles are listed below: 10046 Extended SQL Trace Interpretation 10046 Extended SQL Trace Interpretation 2 10046 Extended SQL Trace Interpretation 3 Brain Teaser: 10046 Extended SQL Trace Shows “EXEC #435118472:c=15600,e=510″, How is that Possible? [...]

September 18, 2011 I do not recall putting together any articles about inline views, so let’s start out with a couple of examples before taking a look at a quote.  We need to create a table for this example, so I will reuse a slightly modified table creation script from another article, and also collect [...]