I am delighted to share that my new Oracle book, Oracle Database Performance Tuning with AWR, ASH and ADDM, will be published by Apress.

For readers interested in the book, I will share a series of previews here. This second post covers the section “Table of Contents“

Table of Contents

Front Matter

• About the Author (p. viii)
• About the Technical Reviewer (p. ix)
• Acknowledgments (p. xi)
• Introduction (p. xii)

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PART I: ASH (p. 1)

CHAPTER 1: ASH Fundamentals (p. 14)

• The ASH Mechanism (p. 14)
• Advantages of ASH (p. 17)
• Hidden Parameters That Control ASH Behavior (p. 20)
• Licensing for AWR, ASH, and ADDM (p. 21)
• Summary (p. 26)

CHAPTER 2: ASH Report (p. 26)

• Generating an ASH Report (p. 26)
• An Example of Interpreting an ASH Report (p. 30)
• Summary (p. 37)

CHAPTER 3: Querying Raw ASH Data with SQL (p. 37)

• ASH Data Capture Mechanism (p. 38)
• Identifying Top Entities (p. 44)
• Summarizing Session Activity across Any Dimensions (p. 51)
• Creating Timelines of Anything with Oracle ASH (p. 56)
• Answering Ad Hoc Questions (p. 62)
• Summary (p. 69)

CHAPTER 4: ASH in Action: Practical Use Cases (p. 69)

• Pinpointing the Slowest Step in an SQL Execution Plan (p. 70)
• Monitoring SQL Execution Plan Changes (p. 74)
• Estimating SQL Runtime and Detecting Outliers (p. 76)
• Determining Whether the Database Is Responsible for Slow Response (p. 86)
• Tracing the Session Blocking Chain (p. 89)
• Diagnosing an RMAN Job Slowdown (p. 98)
• Summary (p. 101)

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PART II: AWR (p. 101)

CHAPTER 5: AWR Fundamentals (p. 101)

• The AWR Mechanism (p. 101)
• AWR Snapshots (p. 103)
• Managing AWR in Multitenant Environments (p. 113)
• Generating AWR Reports (p. 116)
• DB Time (p. 126)
• Average Active Sessions (p. 129)
• Summary (p. 134)

CHAPTER 6: How to Read an AWR Report (p. 135)

• Report Header (p. 136)
• Load Profile (p. 140)
• Instance Efficiency Percentages (p. 154)
• Top 10 Foreground Events (p. 157)
• Wait Classes by Total Wait Time (p. 168)
• I/O Profile (p. 174)
• Time Model Statistics (p. 180)
• SQL Statistics (p. 183)
• Summary (p. 194)

CHAPTER 7: Querying Raw AWR Data with SQL (p. 195)

• Understanding Raw AWR Data (p. 196)
• Monitoring Database Activity with System Statistics (p. 199)
• Analyzing Service-Level Statistics (p. 210)
• Gauging System Performance with Metrics (p. 217)
• Analyzing SQL Performance across Snapshots (p. 227)
• Monitoring I/O Activity (p. 240)
• Tracking Tablespace Usage and Growth (p. 254)
• Summary (p. 259)

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PART III: ADDM (p. 259)

CHAPTER 8: Automating Diagnostics with ADDM (p. 259)

• Working with AWR and ASH (p. 260)
• ADDM Reports (p. 262)
• Mining Hidden Treasures from ADDM Views (p. 275)
• Summary (p. 286)

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PART IV: USING THE TRIAD IN ACTION (p. 286)

CHAPTER 9: How Oracle Uses CPU (p. 286)

• Most IT Pros Read CPU Metrics Wrong (p. 287)
• Why Does CPU Utilization Lie to You? (p. 294)
• How Oracle Calculates CPU Metrics (p. 300)
• Detecting CPU Noisy Neighbors (p. 305)
• How to Detect CPU Starvation and Evaluate Its Severity (p. 310)
• Summary (p. 317)

CHAPTER 10: What’s the AWR Report Trying to Tell Us? (p. 317)

• Assessing Overall I/O Latency with Little’s Law (p. 318)
• Estimating Storage Response Time with Synchronous Single-Block Reads Latency (p. 319)
• Are Your Online Redo Logs Adequately Sized? (p. 324)
• Does Your Application Properly Use Bind Variables? (p. 327)
• Is There Excessive Rollback Activity in the Database? (p. 341)
• Is Your PGA Size Set Correctly? (p. 345)
• Do You Really Need RAC? (p. 351)
• Is Your Connection Pool Properly Sized? (p. 363)
• Summary (p. 372)

CHAPTER 11: Real-World Case Studies (p. 372)

• Slow Standby Database Dragging Down the Primary (p. 373)
• Finding the Contended Rows Behind enq: TX – row lock contention (p. 379)
• Zeroing In: Tracing the Exact Moment of Performance Regression (p. 383)
• Finding the Cause of Severe “Buffer busy wait” (p. 390)
• When the Average Lies: Detecting Skewed I/O Latency (p. 394)
• Why 90% Idle CPU Became a Bottleneck (p. 398)
• Summary (p. 409)