White Paper
1
INTRODUCTION
Investigating the root cause of a SQL-related performance problem typically
involves using Oracle’s Profiler and Tracing facilities. Thankfully, the wealth of
information from these tools is easily gathered and analyzed with Quest’s Toad
®
for
Oracle.
However, it has been documented that a majority of performance problems with
database applications come down to poor execution plans or poor indexing
implementations. Solving these performance problems requires different strategies.
If the plan is bad and the query is available, you can re-design the query and hope
that Oracle’s optimizer chooses a better plan. If the query isn’t available for
changes, you can experiment with different indexing scenarios, in hopes of
influencing how the database chooses to gather the data. This paper explains how
to use Toad for Oracle to view and understand the execution plans for your SQL
statements so you can re-design them for better performance.