This document discusses opportunities for tuning commercially available packaged applications. Application managers team members responsible for acceptable application performance are the most likely to benefit from this discussion. There will be a strong focus on database tuning within this document so a Database Administrators (DBAs) and developers may find particular value. We will discuss basic tuning issues associated with these products, strategies to consider and technical suggestions that may aid your successful tuning.

First, we will address the growing roles of packaged applications in the enterprise and what this means to an information technology (IT) organization. We will then investigate the unique tuning challenges presented by these products followed by a brief survey of the vendor provided solutions. The next section presents a review of common performance enhancement strategies, which in turn is followed by suggestions as how best to achieve success in tuning these products.