Rob Smyth's Blog

In my earlier post, chips with everything, I discussed the issue of what is a processor.  This leads inexorably to the topic of how to get the best performance out of the servers that you have bought.  While practice makes perfect it is also worth considering some models to help you work out the feasibility of what you are proposing.  Oracle 10g has a performance tuning guide in the documentation set and includes sections on:
Designing and developing for performance
Performance Improvement Methods
and
I/O Configuration and Design

There are also other helpful sites out there in the Oracle community.  Of particular interest to me due to my mathematics background is the queueing theory model expounded here: http://resources.orapub.com/forecast_main.asp
and there are many others.  My recommendation is that if you know you need to have a performant system, use these ideas to help you, your DBAs and your developers have performance in their minds whenever they are building or writing functionality.