Beginning Oracle Database 11g Administration From Novice to Professional

CHAPTER 2
SQL and PL/SQL
A number of our established “powerful” programming language features, even
beloved ones, could very well turn out to belong rather to “the problem set” than to
“the solution set.”
—Dutch computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra, advocate of structured
programming and winner of the 1972 Turing Award, in “Correctness
Concerns and, Among Other Things, Why They Are Resented”
All database activity is conducted in SQL, and therefore database administrators need
to be intimately familiar with it. Figure 2-1 illustrates that the greatest potential for
performance improvement usually lies within the software application, not within the
database where the application stores its data or within the physical infrastructure where
the database is housed. 1
Application
Effort
Time
Complexity
Risk
Database
System
Improvement
Figure 2-1. The performance improvement pyramid
1. Based on a discussion in Oracle Rdb Guide to Database Performance and Tuning. Rdb is another
relational database management system sold by Oracle—Oracle acquired it from Digital Equipment
Corporation together with DEC/DBMS, a network database management system.
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