Another free chapter download is available on the IT Bookworm Blog. Written by: John Goodson and Robert A. Steward Book: The Data Access Handbook: Achieving optimal database application performance and scalability Overview: “Performance and scalability are more critical than ever in today’s enterprise database applications, and traditional database tuning isn’t nearly enough to solve the performance problems you are likely to see in those applications. Nowadays, 75-95% of the time it takes to process a data request is typically spent in the database middleware. Today’s worst performance and scalability problems are generally caused by issues with networking, database drivers, the broader software/hardware environment, and inefficient coding of data requests. In The Data Access Handbook, two of the world’s leading experts on database access systematically address these issues, showing how to achieve remarkable improvements in performance of real-world database applications. Drawing on their unsurpassed experience with every leading database system and database connectivity API, John Goodson and Rob Steward reveal the powerful ways middleware affects application performance and guide developers with designing and writing API code that will deliver superior performance in each leading environment. In addition to covering essential concepts and techniques that apply across database systems and APIs, they present many API examples for ODBC, JDBC, and ADO dot NET as well as database system examples for DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, and Sybase.” Chapter 4: Tuning for performance

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