Performance tuning is crucial in any modern relational database management system. The first edition covered the tuning of system parameters; the use of strategies like indexing and denormalization; performance issues for SQL, PL/SQL, and SQL Forms; and many diagnostic and tuning tools. This edition is a revision of the original book, adding material on Oracle 7.3 and many Oracle 8 features. It explores Oracle capabilities lie parallel server, parallel query and distributed database. The book comes with a disk containing many programs and scripts that you can put to work immediately at your own site.