* Chapter 2, Listening to Oracle's Pain: Here, you learn how to diagnose complex Oracle systems with pinpoint accuracy. The material is based on Oracle's kernel instrumentation and response-time analysis using the latest Oracle capabilities.

* Chapter 3, Serialization Control: Locks and latches are a mystery to many, including the most seasoned Oracle professionals. And with Oracle Database 10g Release 2, Oracle introduced mutexes! Most DBAs feel there is little you can do when latching contention raises its ugly head, but this is not true. I have found that once you understand the general latch and mutex algorithms, and are equipped with knowledge of Oracle's memory architecture and algorithm internals, latch/mutex contention solutions become very apparent.

* Chapter 4, Identifying and Understanding Operating System Contention: This chapter focuses on each subsystem (I/O, memory, CPU, and network), teaching you how to quantify both throughput and contention (entire system and top processes) using standard Unix/Linux tools. If you want to effectively fight performance fires, you must be able to quickly find the operating system bottleneck and relate that to Oracle.