The need for speed: Simple tested techniques to beef up performance of your solaris/oracle database

Failure was not an option. We had a very short time to make an important application perform very much better. Obviously we couldn’t do a complete rewrite. However, we were fortunate enough to have use of a full-sized server to test some tuning strategies. Thorough research into best practices around OS buffering and filesystem alternatives turned up some simple hypotheses to test. Once we set to work, turn-around was surprisingly quick and improvement impressive. These findings can be applied to many existing Solaris/Oracle databases with equally good results. This paper will detail the concepts behind our work, discuss the test procedures and present actionable findings.