What makes seasoned IT professionals run for cover? Answer: Forecasting Oracle Performance! Craig Shallahamer is an Oracle performance expert with over 18 years of experience. His book is the first to focus not on the problem of solving today's problem, but squarely on the problem of forecasting the future performance of an Oracle database. Other Oracle performance books are good for putting out fires; Craig's book helps you avoid all the heat in the first place.

If you're an IT practioner who appreciates application over mathematical proofs than you'll be pleasantly surprised! Each chapter is filled with examples to transform the theory, mathematics, and methods into something you can practically apply. Craig's goal is to teach you about real-word Oracle performance forecasting. Period. There is no hidden agenda.

This book is a kind of training course. After reading, studying, and practicing the material covered in this book, you to be able to confidently, responsibly, and professionally forecast performance and system capacity in a wide variety of real-life situations.

If you are more management-minded (or want to be), you will be delighted with the service level management focus. Forecasting makes good business sense because it maximizes the return on IT investment and minimizes unplanned down time. To those who think forecasting is a waste of money: well...obviously, they've never been on the evening news because their company lost millions of dollars in revenue and brand destruction because of poorly performing or unavailable systems.

Without a doubt, you will be equipped to deal with the realities of forecasting Oracle performance. But this book gives you more. Not only will you receive a technical and mathematical perspective, but also a communication, a presentation, and a management perspective. This is career building stuff and immensely satisfying!

What you'll learn

This book is a “how-to” book filled with examples to transform theory and mathematics into something you can practically apply. You will learn how to use a variety of forecasting models, which will enable you to methodically:

• Help manage service levels from a business value perspective
• Identify the risk of over utilized resources
• Predict what component of an architecture is at risk
• Predict when a system will be at risk
• Develop multiple risk mitigating strategies to ensure service levels are maintained
• Characterize a complex Oracle workload

Who this book is for

IT professionals who must ensure their production Oracle systems are meeting service levels, in part, through forecasting performance, identifying risk, and developing solutions to ensure systems are available without wasting budget. Readers include database administrators, IT managers, developers, capacity planners, systems architects, systems integrators.