Oracle SQL Performance Tuning and Optimization: It's all about the Cardinalities

Every so often a caring book, one which strives to help you, the DBA in the trenches, learn from ground up what you must know in order to make inroads in this field, is published, and this book is an outstanding one!I got a ton of SQL tuning information from Kevin's book. Kevin's style of writing is one in which he sincerely cares about sharing with you his years of hands-on optimization experience and acquired knowledge, which is deep-rooted and well-researched! Additionally, this book is for performance engineers/DBAs/developers who have an interest in understanding a methodical way of SQL tuning and get exposed to the answers to some of the questions that had lingered on in their minds for a long time. Developers will learn tips on writing efficient code correctly. Beginners will gain more than they have bargained for! Reading this book takes some effort and a great deal of concentration, but in the end you will be happy you've read it!The accompanying nifty scripts will save you lots of time and put you ahead of the game the next day you go to work!Thank you Kevin!

If you have ever wanted to improve your ability to read and understand Oracle query explain plans (QEP) and how to use this information to tune a problem query, then this is the book for you.The author lays out a methodology called Filtered Rows Percentage and then takes you through the step by step journey to understand this methodology. During the process you will become very efficient in reading and understanding execution plans in Oracle and how to visually map the QEP and query. Each chapter provides examples and helper scripts to reinforce the concepts being taught. I found the explanations are very clear and easy to understand.This book also provides some excellent insight on indexing, use of hints in troubleshooting and BASICS (or following good database design principles).At the end of the book is an exercise to reverse engineer an execution plan. Working through this exercise will greatly improve your ability to understand just about any QEP and make you a black belt QEP analyst.I have spent the majority of my 20+ year IT career working as both an Oracle database developer and DBA and this book is in my top 5 books that all Oracle developers and DBAs should read. This material will be finding its way into the training we provide all of our Oracle DBAs and developers where I currently hold a Sr. Oracle DBA position.The only change I would make to the book would be to remove the chapter on Exadata and increase the white space.

I am a long time DBA, turned consultant. I have more than 25 years of tuning experience and have been applying many of Kevin's advices for years.This is an excellent tuning book, presenting the formalized tuning methodology for tuning queries against Oracle RDBMS. Not only is it full of seemingly apparent but frequently forgotten ideas like "learn your query", it also covers advanced topics like dynamic sampling and cardinality feedback. I like the book a lot. Why did I decide to give it only 4 stars out of possible 5? For two reasons: the examples are mainly written using the Oracle SQL dialect, with very few written using ANSI SQL. ANSI SQL is the dialect most frequently generated by the now ubiquitous application generator. The second reason for deciding to rate the book by only 4 stars is a huge emphasis on Exadata. I do not meet Exadata that frequently and I do not consider that part relevant for a general tuning book.Those criteria are, of course, my personal rating criteria. Once again, I consider those shortcomings minor and want to stress that I have thoroughly enjoyed myself reading the book.

I’m 2 chapters in and have learned a ton. We don’t have a QA team to monitor performance of our queries and we do it ourselves, if we do it at all. Looking forward to applying these methods. Also very conversational in writing which has been really helpful

I can't put into words how great this book is. I think anyone who wants to really learn or understand how to tune Oracle SQL needs to read this book first. In my opinion, you should read first the Performance Tuning documentation, THEN read this plus the book by Christian Antognini.I made the mistake of jumping ahead to books that I thought were cool (like internals of Oracle) and gives instant tips which are really like what Tom Kyte says as Rule of Thumb (ROT). I'm not surprised why I have a hard time understanding some of them because I don't even know the concepts that was explained in this book. By doing this my method of tuning have been kind of a mix of guessing and experience based - I didn't really had that method or step by step process of what you need to look at first, what are you searching, what do you need to know first before you can tune the SQL in front of you. This book will break that, and it will give you a method (FRP) - which I think is very solid and has helped me a lot - and I think will help reduce performance issues in your Prod environment.This book along with the one I just mentioned plus the "Oracle Wait Interface" is a perfect combination.I just wish they had an electronic version of this (or did they?) so I could carry it around.

The book is very helpful. However, it do not work on kindle E-reader, just for the kindle fire. How to read the book on kindle E-reader?

On a software development consulting gig, I was given the task of improving the performance of some Oracle queries. The queries took more than two minutes to run, and the customer was extremely unhappy. I'm an experienced Java dev but had no experience at all with tuning SQL queries, and I was at a complete loss as to how to proceed. Then I found Kevin Meade's book. By applying his techniques, I reduced the queries' run time from two minutes to 10 seconds: a 90% performance improvement. Happy customer! Happy management! Thank you, Kevin!