How this guide is organized

How this guide is organized This guide includes the following sections.

Quick tips on how to improve the performance of applications.
A more in-depth discussion of how to improve the performance of applications.
An in-depth study of how executes queries, how the optimizer works, and how to tune query execution.
Information on how the optimizer determines the number of rows that will be scanned from disk when deciding whether to use an index or to scan a particular table.
Reference on how internally transforms some SQL statements for performance reasons. Not of interest to the general user.