When RTFM Goes Wrong IV

The sheer size of Oracle's documentation set always astonishes me, and it's a wonder that any of it ever manages to evolve across versions. But sure enough, the important bits usually get a brush-up during major release changes and a few new bits get thrown in. But not so for a particularly dry part of Chapter 2 of the "Application Developers Guide - Fundamentals" for 10g Release 2 (Chapter 5 in earlier versions), subtitled "Improving Transaction Performance".

Remember this is 10.2 - it's bang up to date as far as Oracle releases go. I don't think that any further comment is required here else the post will get too long so I'll just send you to the link and suggest you take particular note of the comments on stored PL/SQL functions, ANALYZE and explicit cursors.

http://download-uk.oracle.com/docs/cd/B19306_01/appdev.102/b14251/adfns_sqlproc.htm#sthref179

The rollback segment entry can be forgiven as not everyone is using UNDO yet (though I always hated it as a piece of advice when I used rollback segments).