Re: Oracle 8i and poor query performance in some queries

Brian Peasland <dba_at_remove_spam.peasland.com> wrote in message news:<3F954516.E9127BD9_at_remove_spam.peasland.com>...
> Typically, when applications running against a database perform well for
> a time period and then *all of a sudden* stop working as well, then it
> is a scalability issue. The application/database wasn't designed to
> scale well. Most users don't recognize that this performance issue was
> getting worse over time because the the performance differences were not
> that significant. In the "classic" chart of performance, one sees a
> "knee in the curve" where the performance degrades quite a bit. This is
> where poor performance really gets noticed. So the trick now is to see
> what the bottlenecks are and resolve those bottleneck. I'd start by
> setting up Statspack and taking snapshots of system performance at
> certain intervals. The Statspack report can show you the tasks that the
> database spent the most time waiting to complete as well as the worst
> performing SQL statements. Start there.
>

Yes, you are right. We should start to take frequent snapshots of the performance. Still, I feel somehow sad. My dream was to build a database that provides sufficient performance without constant administration and tuning. There are those nice features like automatically inflating data files to minimize out-of-space-situations and uniform size allocation in tablespaces to get rid of unusable space fragments in tablespaces. And in 9i and 10g there will be more and more of them. Despite of all these the need for proactive DBA work seems to remain...

/Heikki Received on Wed Oct 22 2003 - 14:15:27 CDT