RE: Slightly-OT: Throw HW at a SW/DB problem

>> Anyone from the Oracle camp advocating/predicting
>> hardware-based "tuning"?

Note a chance - at least, not as long as the application hard or soft parses everything, every time (parse:execute ratio = 1:1) and we only have one single solitary lonely latch to allow one single solitary session to parse at any time.

True story, no doubt everyone knows it, or one similar:

An application I had to tune was hard parsing just about everything (no binds - ADO doesn't allow binds I was told - wrong!) and soft parsing the rest. I advised that the offshore developers learn to use ADO and got to know how to use Bind variables, where necessary, and parse once, execute many. I wasn't very subtle I'm afraid! I got a telling off from a high-up manager who wanted to protect his offshore company people rather then get them to fix the problem.

Management decided to throw some bigger better servers at the problems. I said "Don't, it will run slower because ..." and explained why it was a bad idea. They agreed to ignore me and put in the bigger hard ware, and my contract was soon at an end. Hopefully, no correlation!

About 18 months later, my old manager called me up to let me know that they had finally got the supplier to rewrite the code using binds etc, and they now have the best working system in the company, users are happy. I asked how it had gone with the new hardware - it ran like a dog, worse than before and the users were extremely unhappy about paying for al that hardware that they had been assured (not my me!) would make the application run quicker. They demanded their old servers back!

So, hardware tuning, not in my shop - unless the problem actually requires it.

And I hate to disagree with Niall on "it's always the app", but it is, in my experience, "always the app". Or the vendor! ;-)

Cheers,
Norm.

Norman Dunbar
Contract Senior Oracle DBA
Capgemini Database Team (EA)
Internal : 7 28 2051
External : 0113 231 2051

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