Re: Oracle Diagnostics Pack

On 3/19/07, Remigiusz Soko?owski <rems_at_wp-sa.pl> wrote:

> LS Cheng wrote:
> > I think it is
> >
> >
> http://download-east.oracle.com/docs/cd/B19306_01/license.102/b14199/options.htm#CIHHIGBI
> >
> > The |V$ACTIVE_SESSION_HISTORY| dynamic performance view is part of
> > this pack.
> >
> > Regards
> >
> > --
> > LSC
> right - I missed this
> so conclusion is, diagnostics pack is very valuable tool for solving db
> problems and definitely worth the money one pays for it

Yes the diagnostics pack is indeed valuable, personally however I'd rather that Oracle hadn't put a separate price tag on it - especially not one that links the price to the licensing metric of the monitored products. I think that this is a poor decision for the following reasons.

First, you now have a second budget argument to make - essentially do I buy the performance management tool from Oracle, or a.n.other tool that may already be in use in the organisation. In many cases the other tools available will be significantly cheaper and win that argument, either on price, on corporate strategy or any number of reasons.

Second, nearly all of Oracle's competitors already have performance management tools licensed with the product - for free. Performance management comes with the job (just like storage and availability management) separately licensed tools to do the job you buy the main product for, well that's just mad - like buying a TV and paying extra for the remote.

Third significant numbers of customers cannot legally buy the product anyway - though they incur the overhead of collecting data that they can't look at. I just did a quick check and 4 approx $20k list you can buy a 4-way dual core AMD opteron based machine with 128gb ram and fibre channel cards to connect through to your SAN. This machine is easily powerful enough to run the sorts of apps that will generate interesting performance issues. You can however run SE on it with only the problem that you can't look at all the performance data that SE will gather for you. Oracle and you all know that I think this is outrageous and should at the very least be corrected by allowing SE customers to buy the tools to do the job.

Finally I think that by and large with 10g Oracle has done The Right Thing(tm) with its approach to tuning - but then lots of customers will be unable to benefit because they didn't pay the extra/win the argument and so on. I'd rather all Oracle customers used appropriate approaches to performance tuning. This is a barrier to that goal.

> --
> Niall Litchfield
> Oracle DBA
> http://www.orawin.info

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