Foreword by Jonathan Lewis
Sir Michael Faraday (scientist extraordinaire, founder of the Royal Institution Friday Discourses, and populariser of the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures) once said: “Lectures which really teach will never be popular; lectures which are popular will never really teach”. The truth behind this statement is important, and helps to explain why we need people like Christian Antognini to publish books like Troubleshooting Oracle Performance.
Popular lectures may give you surprising facts and brilliant ideas, but the benefit usually comes from the work you put in afterwards. Conversely lectures that really teach you something tend to focus on one or two small details and require a lot of effort and concentration to follow in real time – and that’s rarely a path to popularity.
If you’ve been struck by an idea, the benefit of this book is that it can give you the whole story: the background, the context, the alternatives, the side effects and the scripts to repeat (and, perhaps, expand) the demonstrations used to explain the models. (Faraday was also keen on his audiences repeating his experiments and learning by doing.)
Reading the final draft of TOP, I was reminded once again of the sheer volume of information you need to have to be able to produce a good solution to a problem in the shortest possible time; it’s so often the detail you overlooked, or the idea you forgot to check, or the “new” thing you didn’t know about that wastes a lot of your time.
The problem of volume – from the perspective of an author – is how to pull the right fragments of information together into a narrative that conveys the whole story but breaks it into digestible chunks. Christian Antognini has done an excellent job of breaking TOP down into a suitable set of self-contained topics, then producing a thorough exposition of each topic. As I said in the foreword to the 2nd edition, look at the elegant breakdown of “solving a problem” into three chapter headings:
3 Analysis of Reproducible Problems
4 Real-Time Analysis of Irreproducible Problems
5 Postmortem Analysis of Irreproducible Problems
How obvious a breakdown, yet how rarely made explicit. This is the tiniest possible demonstration of why I think this book will remove a lot of the frustration from the task of learning to deal with Oracle performance problems.
—Jonathan Lewis
Jonathan Lewis is well-known in the Oracle world. He started working with the Oracle RDBMS in 1988, starting with version 5 and had to start relearning the workings of the product when version 6 appeared. He has written three books (two published by Apress) about its inner workings and how best to take advantage of its features, contributes to a few others. His experience has taken him to more than 50 different countries to supply his skills at design, tuning and trouble-shooting. Although he gave up long-haul flights more than 10 years ago, and managed to get very close to full retirement when Covid struck, he still keeps in touch with a few people and events in the Oracle community.
Foreword by Cary Millsap
I think the best thing that has happened to Oracle performance in the past ten years is the radical improvement in the quality of the information you can buy now at the bookstore.
In the old days, the books you bought about Oracle performance all looked pretty much the same. They insinuated that your Oracle system inevitably suffered from too much I/O (which is, in fact, not inevitable) or not enough memory (which they claimed was the same thing as too much I/O, which also isn’t true). They’d show you loads and loads of SQL scripts that you might run, and they’d tell you to tune your SQL. And that, they said, would fix everything.
It was an age of darkness.
Chris’s book is a member of the family tree that has brought to us, … light. The difference between the darkness and the light boils down to one simple concept. It’s a concept that your mathematics teachers made you execute from the time when you were about ten years old: show your work.
I don’t mean “show and tell,” where someone claims he has improved performance at hundreds of customer sites by hundreds of percentage points [sic], so therefore he’s an expert. I mean show your work, which means documenting a relevant baseline measurement, conducting a controlled experiment, documenting a second relevant measurement, and then showing your results openly and transparently so that your reader can follow along and even reproduce your test if he wants to.
That’s a big deal. When authors started doing that, Oracle audiences started getting a lot smarter. Since the year 2000, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of people in the Oracle community who ask intelligent questions and demand intelligent answers about performance. And there’s been an acceleration in the drowning-out of some really bad ideas that lots of people used to believe.
In this book, Chris follows the pattern that works. He tells you useful things. But he doesn’t stop there. He shows you how he knows, which is to say he shows you how you can find out for yourself. He shows his work.
That brings you two big benefits. First, showing his work helps you understand more deeply what he’s showing you, which makes his lessons easier for you to remember and apply. Second, by understanding his examples, you can understand not just the things that Chris is showing you, but you’ll also be able to answer additional good questions that Chris hasn’t covered. …Like what will happen in the next release of Oracle after this book has gone to print.
This book, for me, is both a technical and a “persuasional” reference. It contains tremendous amounts of fully documented homework that I can reuse. It also contains eloquent new arguments on several points about which I share Chris’s views and his passion. The arguments that Chris uses in this book will help me convince more people to do the Right Things.
Chris is a smart, energetic guy who stands on the shoulders of Dave Ensor, Lex de Haan, Anjo Kolk, Steve Adams, Jonathan Lewis, Tom Kyte, and a handful of other people I regard as heroes for bringing rigor to our field. Now we have Chris’s shoulders to stand on as well.
—Cary Millsap
Cary Millsap has been solving Oracle performance problems since 1989. In the 1990s, he built Oracle Corporation’s System Performance Group into a 100-person organization that solved hundreds of performance problems all over the world. In 1999, he left Oracle to become an entrepreneur with the same mission in mind. Today, he is the chief executive of Method R, where he makes software for Oracle performance analysts.
Cary is the coauthor, with Jeff Holt, of Optimizing Oracle Performance (O’Reilly, 2003), for which they were named Oracle Magazine’s 2004 Authors of the Year. Cary and Jeff also wrote The Method R Guide to Mastering Oracle Trace Data and The Method R Guide to Tracing Oracle. His latest book, How to Make Things Faster (O’Reilly, 2023), applies ideas developed over decades of Oracle performance work to making anything go faster.
Find Cary at method-r.com and carymillsap.com.