Finished reading Optimizing Oracle Performance yesterday. This book presents an unconventional way of getting better performance out of an Oracle database, throwing statistics like buffer cache hit ratios out of the window. Instead, it focuses exclusively on the response time a user action takes and how this response time is split among the various database calls and wait events. It's a well-written and authoritative book (the author is an ex-Oracle Corp employee with quite a lot of performance analysis experience). Some nits:

1. The chapter on queuing theory could have been moved to an appendix (or even have been skipped altogether).


2. The chapters targeting PHBs could also have been condensed.


3. Unless you have an automated profiler tool (not sure whether the author's web site provides this tool for free), you are not going to get at the response times from voluminous trace files that easily.


4. You will need additional sources to delve deeper into the ways of correctly interpreting the response times (and fixing the underlying causes) -- Rich Niemiec's "Oracle 9i Performance Tuning" is probably a good resource for this.