This learning guide will equip database administrators and application developers to build efficient SQL statements and to tune database applications. When this effort is complemented by database server and PL/SQL application tuning, then a highly efficient application execution environment is created. One will learn about the internals of SQL statement execution, how to monitor the performance of such execution, and how one can influence the behavior of the database to achieve performance gains. This textbook is a mandatory reference for any database administrator or SQL database application developer. 

This course covers information relevant for the certification test EXAM 1Z0-054: ORACLE DATABASE 11G R2: PERFORMANCE TUNING.

Specific prerequisites for this course are the following training courses or equivalent experience:

• ORACLE DATABASE: SQL FUNDAMENTALS

• ORACLE DATABASE: ARCHITECTURE & INTERNALS

TUNING & THE  ORACLE  DATABASE  ADVISORY  FRAMEWORK
VIEWING & MONITORING  THE  EXECUTION  PLAN
UNDERSTANDING  THE  OPTIMIZER
EXECUTION  PLAN  METHODS & OPERATIONS
MANAGING  OPTIMIZER  STATISTICS 
ENHANCED  OPTIMIZER  STATISTICS
HISTOGRAMS & EXTENDED  STATISTICS
APPLICATION  TRACING
ADDM  &  THE  SQL  TUNING  ADVISOR
THE  SQL  ACCESS  ADVISOR
PLAN  MANAGEMENT
MANAGING  CURSOR  SHARING
OPTIMIZER  HINTS

The following specific topics are among those considered:

• Consider the unique and differing tuning issues found in online database applications, enterprise resource and data warehouse environments and the important metrics of SQL statement performance.

• Learn about the internal mechanisms use for SQL statement execution within a database instance and how these can affect performance for good or bad, including the Optimizer facilities known as the Transformation Engine, Estimator and Plan Generator.

• Use a variety of techniques to examine the details of SQL statement execution, spotting trouble areas and bottlenecks which require tuning.

• Learn about the Auto-Task framework and how to manage the automatic collection of Optimizer statistics and automatic SQL tuning using both the programmatic and Enterprise Manager interfaces.

• Learn how statistic deficiencies can dramatically degrade performance, and how these problems are resolved through customized Optimizer statistics collection procedures using the DBMS_STATS() package, system statistics, histograms, expression statistics and MultiColumn statistics.

• Influence the behavior of the Optimizer by setting database parameters and other SQL tuning techniques.

• Utilize the database advisory framework and the SQL Tuning and SQL Access advisors.

• Use plan management to achieve plan stability which is adaptive and even dynamic.

• Understand the self-tuning infrastructure and the automatic SQL tuning capabilities found within the database.

• Employ SQL hints embedded into the statement text to resolve unique tuning challenges.

• Learn to identify poorly performing SQL statements using real-time SQL monitoring and application tracing techniques such as DBMS_MONITOR(), trcsess and tkprof.

• ORACLE DATABASE: IMPLEMENT PARALLEL SQL & PARTITIONING FOR DATA WAREHOUSES