Quick introduction on Oracle Tuning:

Persons who can tune :

• DBA
• Application Designers
• Application Developers
• System Administrators

Why tuning is really required ?

The best way for tuning is all about the careful design of systems and applications. The most of the performance are gained by tuning the application. If any wrong decisions were made in beginning , or if all the users now expecting much more from the system than what they were getting previously then we might seriously consider improving performance of the systems. The longer you delay addressing the tuning process, the more it costs in time and resources.

We should always start tuning with a very clear idea for what you are trying to achieve. Try to measure this as precisely as possible considering in real world terms.

For example:

Process 10,000 quotes per day
Produce 250,000 invoices or any statement overnight at the end of the month

From the above example we can see that this is an iterative process and we cannot forget if we have achieved for tuning the application or our codes by any ways because by the time grows maybe we can face the same issue again.

So even after we tune anything it can come back again. So tuning is a continuous process.

What should be our goal for Tuning:

To make less resource utilization for any application that is being performed , we slao should have close look to the hardware that are been used by our database because it can also cause issuse for slowing down our processes. There are few steps by following it we can achive our goals and slould alwasy repete the process if we didn’t reached our goal:

• Tune the design of the database.
• Tune the application
• Tune the memory that is been used by application and database.
• Tune IO (Input/OUTPUT).
• Tune the contention for database.
• Tune the operating system.

From the above steps the first and second are to be done by the system architects and application developers but DBA can also get involved in application tuning.

I would alwasy suggest everyone to logon to Oracle.com and go to documents section and check for the latest updated document on Performance Tuning guide.