justification of tuning effort

Ok, I just returned from the Oracle Performance Tuning Workshop. Now I’m getting into setting up some monitoring with UTLBSTAT/UTLESTAT, and playing around with Oracle Expert and some other OEM tools. Once I’ve got some regular monitoring going on (I’m running BSTAT/ESTAT against every database once per week) I’ll be ready to attack.

However, in the end I’ve got to be able to show my boss (and myself, and the end user) some meaningful results. Improving hit ratios and physical I/O and all the rest is well and good, but at the end of the day the only thing that really counts is reducing response time for the user. I’ve been poring over the REPORT.TXT out of UTLESTAT, looking for some stats that will be meaningful in this “final analysis.” This is not to be confused with the wealth of stats that help explain WHY the end user is experiencing a certain level of performance. I’m looking for the number (or small group of numbers) that can show managers and end users that “I made such-and-such change, and here’s where it improved your performance.”

I know that as we get into the thick of tuning and administering a database, this can seem overly simplistic, but then I’m trying to show results to overly simplistic management/users. The guy who pays the bills really doesn’t care about “sql area get hit ratios” or “DBWR checkpoints” or any of that stuff. All he cares about is how fast he gets his results, and why he’s running out of disk space. And if they feel that current performance levels (whatever they are) are acceptable, there is a very good chance that they won’t perceive any performance improvement as a result of any tuning efforts, leaving me wondering how to justify the effort.

--
Ed Stevens
(Opinions are not necessarily those of my employer)

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Before you buy. Received on Thu Jan 13 2000 - 10:43:10 CST