Re: Competition for OraPerf

Richard Foote wrote:
> "Mladen Gogala" <mgogala.spam-me-not_at_verizon.net> wrote in message
> news:pan.2006.11.07.03.24.44.150996_at_verizon.net...
> > On Mon, 06 Nov 2006 22:06:56 +0000, Richard Foote wrote:
> >
> >> I'm a consultant and I'm not the slightest bit worried. That's because I
> >> don't rely on reports that recommend throwing hardware at problems that
> >> don't exist and solve problems that really do exist by determining what's
> >> actually wrong ...
> >
> > Richard, such a statement would hold water if the world was clearly cut
> > into right and wrong things but, alas, it is not. I thought it was us
> > Americans who tend to over-simplify things, but I see that Aussies are not
> > immune to that, either.
>
> Hi Mladen
>
> Ummmm, such a statement holds all the water I need in this desert called
> Oracle consulting because it's exactly what I do.
>
> It's not a simplification, it's a fact. Perhaps a rather simple fact but a
> statement of fact nonetheless ...
>

Perhaps you guys are talking at cross-purposes here because of the different ways one can determine a problem statement. It is certainly near-trivial to come up with realistic examples of how a dumb profiler can spit out inanity - the example on the web site is ironically one of those, as Richard demonstrated. And I think Mladen's example is a good one - it demonstrates that short-circuiting a proper tuning methodology by someone who knows what he is doing can be more cost-effective to a business. Will it always be? Of course not, but that is only a problem when it is always used by the business, which removes the "knows what he is doing" from the solution. Will it _never_ be? Also, of course not, there is implicit value to experience, the problem domain allows intuition to extrapolate correctly from past experience. Will it be the optimal solution to the problem? Most likely not - but then, when you insert business valuation into the process, optimal no longer necessarily equals best. Or maybe the other way round.

I often see people (yes, including myself) making extrapolations that are ridiculously wrong. When it blows up in some huge project, that can be both educational and entertaining. On the other hand, many incorrect assumptions may be innocuous or lead to correct results through fallacies. With the limited resources we all have, it has to be a judgement call about many things. The important thing is that we make an effort to make things more rational, while accepting that some things will be difficult to change. Doing nothing invites irrationality. Limiting the solution domain too severely can also be destructive. The trick is to know how and when to use observation to feedback control to go in the right direction.

Sometimes it's good to throw the hardware at it first, because that doesn't rule out tuning it properly later, whereas if you got it going good enough, you suffer when you do need the capacity and can't get it due to arcane capital expenditure rules. So fight BS with BS :-)

jg

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