I use Toad® for Oracle almost everyday to tune and optimize problematic databases for customers, partners and friends. And I noticed that I followed a pattern – which seemed consistent across all such attempts. And although I wrote the whitepaper “Maximize Database Performance via Toad”, in hindsight it provided far too much detailed information to be used as a quick reference guide. 

And since Toad customers overwhelmingly love the key-board shortcuts strip we give out at shows and the Toad Pocket reference book, I figured a nice, one page, graphical summary of my database tuning via TOAD would be handy.

So below is my database tuning and optimization check-list using Toad. Note that the standard Toad product does not provide sufficient coverage to be most effective. You need at least the optional DBA Module and potentially the Toad Xpert Edition in order to achieve the highest level of success J