Five Primary Tuning Activities

There are many hundreds of tuning strategies in Oracle. This course will focus your attention on those tuning activities that will provide the largest performance gains.
As a general rule, Oracle tuning activities can be listed in order of importance, with the most important activities first:

When implementing performance tuning in an Oracle database, the first step you should undertake is a comprehensive analysis of the system's performance. This involves identifying performance bottlenecks, understanding the root causes of performance issues, and establishing a baseline for comparison. By starting with a thorough analysis, you can prioritize tuning efforts and ensure that you focus on the most critical areas for improvement.

1. Establish a performance baseline: Before you begin tuning the Oracle database, it's crucial to establish a performance baseline, which represents the current state of the system. This baseline will serve as a reference point to measure the impact of your tuning efforts and ensure that you're making meaningful improvements.
2. Monitor and gather performance data: Regularly monitoring the performance of your Oracle database is essential for identifying bottlenecks and understanding the system's behavior under various workloads. You should collect relevant performance metrics using Oracle's built-in tools, such as Automatic Workload Repository (AWR), Active Session History (ASH), and Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM).
3. Identify performance bottlenecks: With the performance data in hand, you can now analyze the information to pinpoint areas where the system is struggling. Focus on aspects like wait events, SQL execution, resource contention, and inefficient use of hardware resources to identify areas where performance can be improved.
4. Prioritize tuning efforts: Based on the analysis of performance data, you should prioritize tuning efforts by focusing on the most significant bottlenecks first. This approach ensures that you achieve the maximum performance improvement with the least amount of effort.

In conclusion, when implementing performance tuning in Oracle, begin with a comprehensive analysis of the system's performance. This involves establishing a performance baseline, monitoring and gathering performance data, identifying performance bottlenecks, and prioritizing tuning efforts. By starting with this crucial first step, you can ensure that your tuning efforts are targeted, efficient, and effective.

1. Oracle logical table design tuning: Eliminating extra SQL join operations can dramatically improve performance of SQL queries.
2. Oracle physical table tuning: This can also have a huge impact on performance. Physical table tuning involves many areas:
   1. Add indexes to eliminate full-table scans
   2. Add multiple table freelists to eliminate table header contention
   3. Cluster tables to improve query performance
   4. Re-sequence physical rows to reduce disk I/O
   5. Alter table parameters (PCTFREE, PCTUSED) to improve insert/update performance
   6. Using parallel query to speed queries
3. SQL tuning: The tuning of SQL is also an important aspect of Oracle performance. As a general rule, SQL tuning is used to improve the access method used by the SQL optimizer to get the requested data.
4. SGA tuning: Tuning the memory regions of Oracle, such as the library cache and buffer pool can help speed Oracle performance.
5. Environment tuning: You can change the amount of RAM memory on the server, dedicate additional CPU, and improve network speed to improve Oracle performance.

Now that we have reviewed the main tuning areas in order of importance, let's look at the metrics of Oracle performance and see how to tell if your database is properly tuned.