Caching frequently accessed data can significantly reduce the use of system resources. By increasing the probability of cache hits, you reduce the amount of processing required to process a result set accessed by your application, thus improving application performance.
Although Oracle caches recently (in practice, this often means frequently) used metadata and data in memory by default, there are still a lot of details to master in order to take full advantage of these caching mechanisms. In this chapter, you learned how Oracle's caching mechanisms work when it comes to processing SQL and PL/SQL statements issued against the database, and why using bind variables can greatly increase the probability of shared pool cache hits. Also, you saw how global contexts can be used to boost performance by caching frequently used information in the memory of the database instance.
Another important topic discussed in this chapter is caching database data frequently accessed by the application...