Question

What are some useful Oracle optimizations one can use for an Application that mostly writes (updates) to an Oracle database?

The general usage pattern here is not web-serving or logging, as is most cases, but instead to persist complex state of a system, so the only times reading is needed is when the system starts up, after that its update and create all the way. Thus right now the Write to Read ratio is over 9 to 1, in this case what database tuning could improve performance?

Answer 1

Monitoring of the system health using statspack (9i) or AWR (10g+) would be the best method of identifying bottlenecks.

In particular:

• lookout for redo waits. The redo log is critical in maintaining a high write rate
• Use bind variables
• Use bulk operations wherever possible.
• Watch for index contention where multiple processes insert records into a single table having an index on a sequence-derived column