After 30 years of working with the Oracle Database, this Expert teaches SQL Tuning to the masses. Not a book of quick tips or rare oddities, these pages teach real knowledge. They present a practical process for tuning badly performing SQL that works reliably in the real world of the Oracle Professional. Refined and Distilled to save you years of the hard grinding everyone else had to go through to learn how to do it, these pages will teach you:

- The Power of Cardinalities
(Estimated Cardinality, Actual Cardinality, Table Cardinality, Cardinality Feedback)
- The Importance of Driving Table and Join Order
(Join Sentence, Join Tree, Query Diagram, Query Data Model)
- The use of Query Decomposition and Reconstruction in localizing the problem component of a query
- How to construct a Filtered Rows Percentage Spreadsheet to learn if a query got off to a good start
- How to extract useful information from Oracle Query Execution Plans
(Query Modification, Cardinality Estimation, Fetch Efficiency, Join Efficiency)
- How to build indexes and evaluate their value to a specific problem query
(DUNSEL Columns, Inequality Predicates, Column Modification, Column Order, Predicate Selectivity)
- How to build the proper set of indexes for specific problem queries when necessary using a formal process
(ACCESS, FILTER, COVERAGE, POST-TABLE FILTERING, Indexing for a Driving Table, Indexing for an Inner Table in a Join)
- How to make joins go faster, particularly Hash Join
(2% Rule, Precision Query vs. Warehouse Query, Most Common Join Failures Scenarios, Tuning the Hash Join)
- How to use hints as a discovery tool instead of a club
- The Absolute Necessity of Good Database Design in Assuring top Performance
(Modeling Paradigm, 3rd Normal Form, SQL Workload Types (OLTP, DSS, Analytic), Fundamentals of Statistics (NDV, Uniform Distribution, Dependence, Dynamic Sampling), Addressing Statistics Problems (Staleness, Skew, Dependence, Defaulting, Out-of-Bounds, Transiency, Bloat)
- Opening Moves used in the trenches for quick diagnosis under pressure
(The Typical Crisis Meeting, Query Analysis Breakdown, Three Kinds of Row Counts, Types of QEP Plan Steps, Questions used to Guide the Analysis)
- As a bonus, a special chapter offers unique perspective on EXADATA and how to position yourself to exploit its opportunities as a Developer or DBA
(Sales Pitch vs. Reality, How much faster will your Apps go?, 40X Speed Up?, SMARTSCAN, Column Projection, Row Filtering, iDB Messaging, Storage Indexes, Bloom Filters, What sours the Secret Sauce, EXADATA's effect on your Applications, NON-EXADATA query costs, Reality of Hybrid Columnar Compression, The Three Compression Strategies, Where you the Oracle Professional can be Unique)
- How to document your work in a ways that let you show others how good you are and teach them how to tune too

Supported by a dozen of Kevin's powerful SQL scripts that make it much easier for you to succeed, you will learn and apply the knowledge and processes found in this book and soon be recognized as one of your company's top SQL Tuning Technicians.