Differences between the First and the Second Edition of Troubleshooting Oracle Performance

Several people asked me how much I changed in the second edition. The short answer is… A LOT.

The main goals set for the revision of the book were the following:

• Add content about Oracle Database 11g Release 2 and Oracle Database 12c Release 1.
• Remove content about Oracle9i and Oracle Database 10g Release 1.
• Add content that was “missing” in the first edition (for example, features like hierarchical profiler, active session history, AWR and Statspack).
• Add information about PHP in the parts that cover features that are specific to programming languages.
• Reorganize part of the material for better readability. For example, splitting the chapter about system and object statistics in two.
• Fix errata and generally enhance the text.

To provide you a visual picture about the changes, with Word I did a diff on the text before and after the editing. Here are the resulting pictures… (note that changes are in red and movements are in green)

1. Performance Problems:
2. Key Concepts:
3. Analysis of Reproducible Problems:
4. Real-Time Analysis of Irreproducible Problems: this is a completely new chapter
5. Postmortem Analysis of Irreproducible Problems: this is a completely new chapter
6. Introducing the Query Optimizer: this is a completely new chapter
7. System Statistics:
8. Object Statistics:
9. Configuring the Query Optimizer:
10. Execution Plans:
11. SQL Tuning Techniques:
12. Parsing:
13. Optimizing Data Access:
14. Optimizing Joins:
15. Beyond Data Access and Join Optimization:
16. Optimizing the Physical Design:

Happy reading!