Oracle High-Performance Tuning with Statspack

Great book, very helpful. It does a wonderful job of explaining how to tune Oracle. Author provides many tips and tricks to improve performance. It contains easy to follow, step-by-step installation instructions and comes with many useable and helpful scripts. I give it an A+!

I found this to be an easy step-by-step guide to the install and use of STATSPACK. The pre-tested scripts are great, and I was able to get STATSPACK running on my database in just a few hours. The STATSPACK extentions for table and index data are also very useful. The text is well-written and easy to understand.

The title belies the scope of this terrific book which is really a comprehensive approach to Oracle tuning. It's not just a "How-To-Do-Statspack" book but it covers Oracle tuning from top to bottom including: tuning the environment (server, disk, network), tuning the Oracle instance (SGA), tuning Oracle objects (tables, indexes, segments), and finding and tuning problem SQL statements. From an "everything-that-touches-Oracle" perspective the author ties it all together with metrics from statspack. Most authors barely make mention of tuning Oracle for the network but I found some great Net8 tuning advice right away. It also comes with tuning tips for PQO and OPS. Some may think the top down approach de-emphasizes SQL tuning but not so. The author even tells how to tune 3rd party applications where you can't touch the underlying SQL code. The book comes with lots of scripts and the author shows how you can do trend analysis with Excel. You can even graph your own performance metrics with free packages like "RRDtool" and other free web-based graphing tools. You can spend $1000's on a 3rd party monitoring package and still not understand tuning or you can buy this book, use the scripts and statspack utility that comes with Oracle, tune the database with understanding, then observe and document the improvements you made with captured statistics. This is a roll up your sleaves kind of book.

"High-Performance Tuning with Statspack" establishes a baseline understanding of tuning and addresses each topic in an easy to understand manor, with illustrated examples of how to implement the concept. There are commands and tools to identify network and system performance slow downs, like top, iostats and vmstat. Each is documented how to use and what the output really means. Examples throughout the book include the commands for different hardware, like Solaris, HP and AIX. The one thing I found most useful was the methodical way to identify a performance issue as a network, system, rdbms or sql code issue. This book is filled with tips and tricks, sql code, and other useful commands that help you get to the heart of the your tuning issues.

Statspack is one of the best Oracle provided tuning utilities to be released. However, Statspack is a complex program to install, run and most importantly, understand the output from. In this book Don leads the reader through the installation, setup and use of the Statspack packages. In addition Don shares numerous scripts and techniques for expanding Statspack to allow the user to monitor system and disk related statsitics as well as database internal statistics. Over all an excellent book for both the beginner and advanced DBA who wants to get up to speed on the Oracle Statspack package in the shortest possible time.