Cary's Book - new topic

From: Wolfgang Breitling <breitliw_at_centrexcc.com>
Date: Tue, 07 Oct 2003 10:09:29 -0800
Message-ID: <F001.005D248E.20031007100929@fatcity.com>

I've got Cary's book for about a week now and I have a comment. On page 12 he defines response time as

"The elapsed time between the end of an inquiry or demand on a computer system and the beginning of a response; for example, the length of the time between an indication of the end of an inquiry and the display of the first character of the response at a user terminal."

I know from the reference provided that he did not create that definition himself. Do you agree with it? I don't. I believe that "it depends" and that there are cases where the user would define response time as the time from initiating the request until the entire transaction is complete, especially if subsequent work is dependent on the completion. You can easily play the "evil genie" in these cases by "improving" the response time such that the first character shows up sooner, yet the last character shows up much later (in the vein of first_rows vs. all_rows), effectively making things worse for the user. So even the definition of response time comes back to the business case. Sometimes the user can continue with the next task as soon as the first pieces of the request arrive, while at other times she can not until the last pieces are complete.

Wolfgang Breitling
Oracle7, 8, 8i, 9i OCP DBA
Centrex Consulting Corporation
http://www.centrexcc.com

--

Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net
--

Author: Wolfgang Breitling
  INET: breitliw_at_centrexcc.com

Fat City Network Services    -- 858-538-5051 http://www.fatcity.com
San Diego, California        -- Mailing list and web hosting services
---------------------------------------------------------------------

To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: ListGuru_at_fatcity.com (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). Received on Tue Oct 07 2003 - 13:09:29 CDT