Edward Whalen is the founder of Performance Tuning Corporation (www.perftuning.com), a consulting company specializing in database performance, administration, and backup/recovery solutions. Prior to starting Performance Tuning Corp., Mr. Whalen worked at Compaq Computer Corporation as an OS developer, and then as a database performance engineer. He has extensive experience in database system design and tuning for optimal performance. His career has consisted of hardware, OS, and database development projects for many different companies. Mr. Whalen has written three other books on the Oracle RDBMS and four books on MS SQL Server. He has also worked on numerous benchmarks and performance tuning projects with both Oracle and MS SQL Server. Mr. Whalen is recognized as a leader in database performance tuning and optimization. In addition to his experience in Oracle on many different OS platforms, such as Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, and Windows, he has recently spent significant time working with Oracle on Linux, including the deployment of some of the first RAC clusters on Linux. He works closely with both Red Hat and Novell/SUSE with many different flavors of Linux.