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.

This book first builds a framework, so I can cram as much useful information into your brain as possible. I can see it in my students' eyes: If I don't take the time to create a framework, followed by a proven method, and then fill in the missing technical parts, they are quickly overwhelmed. I've followed this approach in this book. If you look at the chapter titles, you'll notice I develop a framework for performance analysis focused on Oracle performance firefighting, then dig into spot-on diagnosis, and then fill in the missing parts with deep yet relevant Oracle internals.