Writing Effective Code

By “writing effective code,” I mean writing application code that uses the Oracle database in the most efficient manner. It is quite easy to write code that “works” with the Oracle database, but you will often find, if you investigate, that your code is performing much slower than with other available alternatives, is hogging shared resources in the database (thus affecting performance and scalability), or is simply making the database do unnecessary work in achieving a particular task.

The mantra in this book is that we should not just produce code that “works”; we should produce code that works well. We test our code rigorously at every stage, using the tools described in Chapter 1, and we prove that it doesn’t consume too many system resources, and that it doesn’t make the database perform more work than is necessary to complete a given task.