此书是著名oracle技术专家tom的作品。tom的上一本大作（oracle专家高级编程expert one-on-one）已经倍受读者推崇,口碑很好。相对于expert one-on-one来说，这本书讲述的是"this is what i think you should do"而不是"this is how is works",后者是expert one-on-one的主要内容。
这本effective oracle by design的出版还有些小周折，本来是tom谈妥的是wrox出版社，没想到，天有不测风云，wrox的母公司破产，tom只好另找买家。
oracle dbas and developers are all too familiar with the outlay of time and resources, blown budgets, missed deadlines, and marginally effective performance fiddling that is commonplace with traditional methods of oracle performance tuning. in this crucial book, cary millsap, former vp of oracle's system performance group, clearly and concisely explains how to use oracle's response time statistics to diagnose and repair performance problems. cary also shows how "queueing theory" can be applied to response time statistics to predict the impact of upgrades and other system changes.
optimizing oracle performance eliminates the time-consuming, trial-and-error guesswork inherent in most conventional approaches to tuning. you can determine exactly where a system's performance problem is, and with equal importance, where it is not, in just a few minutes--even if the problem is several years old.
optimizing oracle performance cuts a path through the complexity of current tuning methods, and streamlines an approach that focuses on optimization techniques that any dba can use quickly and successfully to make noticeable--even dramatic--improvements.
for example, the one thing database users care most about is response time. naturally, dbas focus much of their time and effort towards improving response time. but it is entirely too easy to spend hundreds of hours to improve important system metrics such as hit ratios, average latencies, and wait times, only to find users are unable to perceive the difference. and an expensive hardware upgrade may not help either.
it doesn't have to be that way. technological advances have added impact, efficiency, measurability, predictive capacity, reliability, speed,and practicality to the science of oracle performance optimization. optimizing oracle performance shows you how to slash the frustration and expense associated with unraveling the true root cause of any type of performance problem, and reliably predict future performance.
