Chapter 1: An Introduction to Query Tuning and Optimization

We have all been there; suddenly, you get a phone call notifying you of an application outage and asking you to urgently join a conference bridge. After joining the call, you are told that the application is so slow that the company is not able to conduct business; it is losing money and, potentially, customers too. And many times, nobody on the call can provide any additional information that can help you find out what the problem is. So, what you should do? Where do you start? And perhaps more important, how do you avoid these problems from reoccurring in the future?

Although an outage can occur for several different reasons, including a hardware failure or an operating system problem, as a database professional, you should be able to proactively tune and optimize your databases and be ready to quickly troubleshoot any problem that may eventually occur. This book will provide you with the knowledge and tools required...