Learn through this practical guide to SQL tuning how Oracle's own experts do it, using a freely downloadable tool called SQLTXPLAIN. This new edition has been expanded to include AWR, Oracle 12c Statistics, interpretation of SQL Monitor reports, Parallel execution, and Exadata-related features. Reading this book and using SQL helps you learn to tune even the most complex SQL, and you'll learn to do it quickly, without the huge learning curve usually associated with tuning as a whole.

Firmly based in real-world problems, this book helps you reclaim system resources and avoid the most common bottleneck in overall performance, badly tuned SQL. You'll learn how the optimizer works, how to take advantage of its latest features, and when it's better to turn them off. Best of all, the book is updated to cover the very latest feature set in Oracle Database 12c.

• Identify how and why complex SQL has gone wrong
• Correctly interpret AWR reports generated via SQLTXPLAIN
• Collect the best statistics for your environment
• Know when to invoke built-in tuning facilities
• Recognize when tuning is not the solution
• Spot the steps in a SQL statement's execution plan that are critical to performance of that statement
• Modify your SQL to solve performance problems and increase the speed and throughput of production database systems