Publisher's Synopsis
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.