Conclusion
Decisions made during database and application design are likely to determine the maximum performance potential of your application so take the time during design to ensure that your database application can reach its full performance potential.
In this article, we’ve only scratched the surface of the many design decisions that can impact performance. For more information, my new book Oracle Performance Survival Guide (Prentice Hall, October 2009) elaborates on all of the topics in this article and many other design issues. The book also covers SQL and PL/SQL tuning, database contention, memory tuning, disk IO optimization, RAC performance and more.