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The Mysterious Oracle DBA
To management and the IT staff, the
Oracle DBA is shrouded in mystery. They can be aloof, speak in
indecipherable acronyms and manage their databases with cryptic
scripts and tools. Of course, there is no magic to Oracle
tuning, but there are techniques that can change the behavior of
an entire database. Throughout this book, the term “silver
bullet” will be used to describe any small DBA action that has a
dramatic effect on the performance of a large portion of an
Oracle database.
There are many silver bullets for Oracle
performance tuning. A silver bullet simply contains a small set
of commands that quickly relieves an acute performance
bottleneck. Some of these just-in-time tuning techniques have
been codified in Oracle10g via the Automatic Memory Management (AMM)
facility, in which the SGA regions are changed dynamically to
meet the changing demands of the application.
While there is no substitute for good
database design, well-coded PL/SQL and optimized SQL, the Oracle
DBA often has no control over the quality of these components.
Silver bullets are sometimes the only solutions that remain for
the Oracle DBA for any number of reasons. |