Secret ORACLE is the definitive guide to undocumented and partially documented features of the ORACLE database server. This book will improve your efficiency as an ORACLE database administrator and enable you to master more difficult administrative, tuning, and troubleshooting tasks than you ever thought possible. Topics covered include: The MERITS performance optimization method, which extends the state-of-the-art wait event tuning paradigm. Controlling processes of an ORACLE instance with the fragmentarily documented ORADEBUG command to trace SQL statements as well as wait events and dump process state, call stack, and hang analysis information. Tracing the cost based optimizer to understand its cost calculations and decisions. Understanding hidden parameters that govern Automatic PGA Memory Management. Leveraging undocumented features of the Oracle10g/11g scheduler and other partially or fully undocumented PL/SQL packages, such as DBMS_SYSTEM, DBMS_SUPPORT, and DBMS_UTILITY.