Intro

All database application performance and scalability problems can be solved by tuning the database. Ask the database experts – they’ll tell you this. They’ll even convince you to spend thousands to millions of dollars a year to tune the database software to solve performance issues. When tuning doesn’t resolve the problem, they’ll tell you that the database software or hardware, or both, is simply at capacity. But, if only 5% to 25% of the time it takes to process a database request is actually spent in well tuned database server software, does it make sense that performance bottlenecks occur because of these “at capacity” systems

- Preface, The Data Access Handbook