General Guidelines for Writing High-Performance Code

Up to now, we have discussed the need to write application code that performs well and does not make the database do unnecessary work. We have also seen how a solid grasp of PL/SQL and SQL will help you succeed in your quest to write high-performance applications. In this section, we will look at some general guidelines for achieving high performance in your applications.

Know the Features Offered by Oracle

Time and again, I have seen that developers don’t take enough time to gain knowledge about the features offered by Oracle. This proves very costly as we reinvent the wheel by rewriting what has already been written by Oracle for us. In the past, I myself have been guilty of this.

For example, in one of the systems I worked on, I needed to maintain a history of changes to records in a set of tables. It took my team about a man-month to write procedural code for this purpose before we realized that there is a feature called Workspace Management in Oracle that will do this for us already (see Oracle Application Developer's Guide – Workspace Manager [10g Release 1] for more details). I was able to write pretty much the same code in half a day using the Workspace Management feature! Had I known about this feature earlier, I could have potentially saved the team at least that one man-month’s worth of effort (assuming that the restrictions that this feature imposed were acceptable to our system).