Re: Evaluating overall performance
Date: Thu, 8 Apr 2010 13:53:09 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <f8ea5ae9-dd71-41dd-97e1-6981c8876080_at_q23g2000yqd.googlegroups.com>
On Apr 8, 4:58 pm, AD <alain.den..._at_gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've been on the development side of things most of the time for the
> past years,
> but lately getting to do more dba work.
>
> I yet need to find material on "seeing the big picture" so to be able
> to describe and evaluate the performance of an Oracle system.
>
> The books I own are very good on drilling down to the fine details of
> a query, but I need to do the opposite and improve my skill on
> "measuring" the performance of the whole server, enabling me to
> communicate with others why the system is in good shape or why it
> needs attention.
>
> ..sort of the opposite of "tuning" for a specific tasks, and more like
> assessing the actual performance of the server...
>
> any good books, articles and links are welcomed,
>
> Thanks,
>
> Alain
Hello Alain,
As others have pointed out, there is a business dimension to performance. This means that even if the ' big picture' isn't good, ( e.g. with lots of inefficient queries), this still can be acceptable and not worth tuning. Tuning without the business dimension can often lead to behavior what is called 'Compulsory Tuning Disorder' : keep on tuning without goal.
Having said that, there are indeed ways to get ' the big picture' - this is mainly used for capacity planning. ( e.g. can the database handle an load of 50 extra users?).
The person to check out is Craig Shallahamer. His ' Forcasting Oracle Performance' and ' Performance firefighting' books are very good for the big picture of the system. He stresses the point that there are 3 area's ( OS, application and RDBMS) that need to participate in this big picture.
Helma Received on Thu Apr 08 2010 - 15:53:09 CDT