I've spent most of my professional life either teaching others how to fight Oracle performance fires (and even better, avoid them in the first place) or doing the work myself. I still remember my very first assignment. While booking my flight to Round Rock, Texas, I was scared to death, but excited all the same. I was wondering what the client would be like. And I was enjoying getting to know my new colleague and friend for the first time.1 Since then, I've seen grown men and women cry, watched a chief financial officer grab an Oracle salesman by the tie and drag him across the room, visited nearly every continent and 23 countries, eaten things (food is hardly the right word) I won't mention, stayed in hotels fit for kings and the homeless, and enjoyed conversations with people all over the world.

This book is the culmination of all these experiences written down so I can share them with a broader audience than I could ever hope to personally work with. I hope you find it phenomenally valuable in your performance firefighting quest!

This book details a proven, integrated, and cooperative (some would say holistic) approach to solving complex Oracle database performance problems. We all tend to favor our analysis on the Oracle internals, SQL tuning, or operating system side. It's just who we are. But by performing our analysis from multiple perspectives, followed by integration, we get an unbreakable diagnosis that is spot-on. The first part of this book is aimed at performance analysis methods that will naturally foster a comprehensive performance perspective.