Chapter 9. My Code Runs Faster Than Your Code

Certainly one of the most frustrating experiences an application user can have is slow performance. Software is supposed to help people get things done faster and more easily. Ah, the gap between "supposed to" and reality!

This chapter offers many recommendations for helping you improve the performance of your PL/SQL programs. Of course, tuning PL/SQL is just a small part (and often not the most crucial part) of application tuning. Development teams (and their DBAs) must also optimize SQL statements (the most common source of performance issues) and overall database instance activity. Before diving into the details, I offer the following high-level advice regarding code optimization: