Secrets of the Oracle Database is the definitive guide to undocumented and partially documented features of the Oracle database server. Covering useful but little-known features from Oracle9i Database through Oracle Database 11g, this book will improve your efficiency as an Oracle database administrator or developer. Norbert Debes shines the light of day on features that help you master more difficult administrative, tuning, and troubleshooting tasks than you ever thought possible.

Finally, in one place, you have at your fingertips knowledge that previously had to be acquired through years of experience and word of mouth through knowing the right people. What Norbert writes is accurate, well-tested, well-illustrated by clear examples, and sure to improve your ability to make an impact in your day-to-day work with Oracle.

What you'll learn Take advantage of Oracle's built-in Perl DBI distribution to write applications for monitoring, benchmarking, data extraction, and more. Interpret the undocumented, extended trace file format to pinpoint performance problems that TKPROF reports overlook and obscure. Get the most out of Statspack by using undocumented report formatting options, accessing its scarcely-documented repository, and integrating with SQL Trace. Take control of your instance through the ill-documented ORADEBUG command, enabling you to control processes, trace SQL statements, dump process state, monitor wait events and the call stack, and much more. Leverage undocumented features in Oracle's built-in scheduler to better automate your workload. Take full advantage of Transparent Application Failover and Cluster Database Services in a Real Application Cluster environment.

Who is this book for?

Secrets of the Oracle Database is written for database administrators and developers well past the beginner level who desire to take full advantage of the power the Oracle platform has to offer. The book is by no means an introductory book. Readers should already be familiar and comfortable with SQL and PL/SQL, and should have a good grounding in Oracle database architecture.