See the links I like tab above for any books I recommend (mastering oracle plsql for example).

Books on "tuning sql" are not "worth anything"

You need to know sql, know what is available. From there, it is purely "applied knowledge" (see my chapter in Effective SQL in my book "Effective Oracle by Design" to see my thoughts on that)

Anything that can be written down about a series of steps to do to "tune" SQL is already done in the software. We call it the optimizer, the sql access advisor, and so on. If there is a rule that says "try this for better sql", the database is probably already trying it out.


The database will never be able to take:

for x in (select * from t)
loop
insert into another_t values ( x.c1, ... );
end loop;

and turn it into the incredibly fast, performant and correct:

insert into another_t select * from t;


That is tuning -- taking your procedural slow by slow process (row by row) and making it a bulk operation.


Taking a procedural implementation that runs for hours and turning it into a couple of minutes by applying your knownledge of analytics -- now that is tuning SQL.