Hi Listers, I am newbie to the DBA / Performance tuning world and was wondering if there were some environments available to "practice" performance tuning in realistic situations. I have been a PL/SQL developer for a while and know a little bit about pro-active performance tuning during development. But again the kinds of problems faced on "Real" systems as opposed to "Dev" boxes are very different, I guess - I never had access to a Production side of things. Some of the questions that I have are: 1. Where does one get started with performance tuning? 2. Various tuning exercises need to be tried on boxes other than Production first - so how does one make the test box similar to what the production has? 3. What sets of built-in tools are generally useful in real life situations? 4. What about any commercial utilities? I would really appreciate responses to this request of mine. Regards, Ramesh.