Oracle8i Internal Services for Waits, Latches, Locks, and Memory

By Steve Adams

This concise book contains detailed information about Oracle internals -- information that's not readily available to Oracle customers. It lays a foundation for advanced performance tuning of the Oracle database. Based on Oracle8i release 8.1, the book describes many of the secrets of Oracle's internal services: data structures, algorithms, and undocumented Oracle system statistics. Main topics include: Waits - how Oracle processes communicate via semaphores, and how to use the Oracle wait statistics to identify the source of performance problems. Latches - how they keep multiple processes from inspecting protected data structures at the same time, and how to examine and control latch behavior and statistics. Locks - how they work with latches to protect data structures (locks allow multiple sessions to share resources in some cases), and how locks affect performance. There is also a detailed discussion of instance locks, which are used in parallel server environments. Memory - how Oracle uses memory (e.g., the various elements of the System Global Area), and how Oracle dynamically allocates and manages memory. Oracle8i Internal Services is aimed especially at administrators and developers who need detailed internal information to do advanced performance tuning. The book will expand your repertoire of tuning solutions and troubleshooting techniques by explaining how you can use Oracle's hidden parameters and undocumented system statistics to best advantage. NOTE: The author has collected the scripts he has developed for tuning and analysis into a toolkit (known as APT, for Advanced Performance Tuning). These scripts access the Oracle X$ tables directly and provide information not otherwise available. The scripts are available to readers for free from the O'Reilly web site.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 156592598X
• ISBN13: 9781565925984
• Release Date: November 1999
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media
• Length: 132 Pages
• Weight: 0.53 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

WOW! Heady stuff. Read it twice.

I'll admit, this book made my head hurt the first time I read it, and I consider myself to be pretty well versed in Oracle. Steve does a fantastic job explaining some of the internal workings of the database. He dispells many of the "tuning" myths associated with locks and latches and touches on using Oracle's wait statistics, which has become a foundation for a new and better approach to tuning the database. If you are DBA that is interested at all in the internal workings of the database, or need a reference to help in your tuning efforts, get this book.

An excellent resource for experienced DBAs

An excellent, must-read book on internal waits for experienced DBAs and performance engineers. Some reviewers gripe that a lot of the information can be found in MetaLink - that is true, but you have to weed through a lot of disconnected discussions. I found this book very useful because it has great depth, is well organized and is a great springing board to further research into other sources - including MetaLink. Excellent work Steve. I can't wait for any follow-on books.

MUST READ for every DBA!

An excellent, very concise book covering the internal mechanisms for locksand latches in Oracle8i. Written clearly and with the level of details that sufficient not only to clarify those otherwise arcane mechanisms of Oracle RDBMS but also to be of immediate practical use. I am a long time Oracle DBA (started with the version 4) and I still learned quite a few things from Steve Adams. Congratulations, Steve and keep up the good work!

Excellent book on internal services!

In five years of being Oracle DBA I never had to tune databases on such level that I would have to know internals on the level described in this book; knowing what's really going on behind all those fancy statistics, using hidden parameters, events or X$ tables directly. I guess I was lucky so far. I think that this book is a must read for *any* DBA!Having several books about tuning Oracle server on my bookshelf not a single one goes deeper in the explanation than this thiny one. We can only imagine and appreciate the time and knowledge that Steve Adams invested in this book. One reminder to those of you who are searching for the definitive tuning guide ("do that, change that..."); Oracle8i Internal Services is not about that, here is what author wrote in the preface ..."My advanced Oracle performance-tuning book is still a dream. This little book is something else: an introduction to Oracle internals. It builds the foundation necessary for advanced performance tuning..."There is only one thing that this book badly need - pictures! So Steve if you're reading this please include some pictures in your second edition (I hope there would be one!).

Excellent resource for Advanced Concepts

I find this book to be very helpful diagnosing obscure errors as well as less defined parameters found in various v$ views and report.txt. Steve, has obviously worked very hard to provide useful information and guidance for those of us not privy to Oracle internals. Looking forward to the next edition.