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Lesson 1

Course introduction

As an Oracle DBA, it is important to remember that your Oracle databases exist within a computer network. Environmental factors such as CPU, RAM, and network communications all influence the performance of your Oracle databases. Essentially there are three environmental factors that affect Oracle performance:

  1. Memory consumption on your machine
  2. CPU consumption on your machine
  3. I/O between your database server and your disk devices

The focus of this course will be to show you how you can take advantage of all the UNIX-based tools for monitoring, configuring, and tuning the external environment.


For those of you who are not using a UNIX environment, remember that the principles addressed in this course apply to systems on NT or MVS or any other system. The external environment that an Oracle instance runs in may be unique in terms of hardware platforms, but the concepts discussed here will be generic to all of them.

Course goals

After completing the course, you will be able to:
  1. Address general tuning issues related to the operating system
  2. Tune Disk I/O for optimal performance
  3. Tune the operating system to reduce memory usage
  4. Tune for effective CPU usage
  5. Reorganize tables to improve I/O performance
  6. Configure and monitor an Oracle listener
  7. Tune with the Multi-Threaded Server for external connections

How you will learn

In this course, you will learn and practice Oracle tuning concepts with three kinds of applets: the diagram, the Slide Show. For additional information on these and other applets, see the Course Orientation.

The series

Tuning the External Oracle Environment is the fourth of five courses in the First-time students: To get the most out of this course, take the Course Orientation. The next lesson is about prerequisites to this course.