RE: missed Anjo's webcast..

<Putting on t-shirt with honkin' big red bullseye target on the front and back>

Stream of conciousness/random thoughts...

To focus exclusively on response time is to fall victim to the same fallacy as focusing exclusively on hit ratios. The fallacy is that there is one and only one methodology to use for tuning/troubleshooting. In 5 years, another approach will supplant response time tuning and we will all scratch our heads and wonder why Anjo and Cary could not see the obvious. Just kidding...you guys will probably be the first to say "While the other approach was good, here is why the new approach is better with this new technology/knowledge".

The best approach, which is often preached, is to use the holistic approach. I recall a paper from some years ago that discussed this approach. Most of the
tuning books advocate such an approach, but we techies get bogged down in the day to day operations and only read the chapters that are of immediate concern.

A poor hit ratio (of any cache) may indicate a problem, even if the response time is adequate. How many systems never increase in size or number of users?

Response time monitoring describes the symptom. It does not define the root cause. A large number of waits for the database writer does not conclusively determine a single root cause. Rather, there are many possible causes (from the cache to processes to i/o subsystem). A slow response time on a query could indicate a malformed query, missing/present indexes, poor storage parameters, an invalid high water mark, excessive read consistent transforms, i/o contention, etc.

One reason why hit ratios are nice is that they are tangible and measurable. Response time satisfaction is not. What is 'slow' to one user is 'fast' to another.

Thoughts...<ducking the inevitable flaming emails>

Dan Fink

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Friday, August 09, 2002 4:18 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

Cary,

I love to talk about the response time thing, but it shouldn't be a lunch but a big dinner (will also settle for Tuborg and hotdogs ;-)).

I think it is acutally great to see this discussion on the BCHR. I don't except people to jump to response time tuning directly and drop the ratio tuning thing. However the response time tuning approach works great also for management. They like to hear things like 85 percent of the end user response time is in the network, because the hit ratio could be perfect in this example (but the problem is outside the database and the hit ratio will not show that .......).

Reponse time/Throughput tuning is not perfect yet. There are may be 1 or 2 tools that look at the whole stack and correlate that information. There are no large number of tuning books about it, so people end up buying the wellknown BCH books. Eventually the whole thing will change. Even Oracle changed STATSPACK in 9.2 to include the CPU time in the TOP5 wait events (now why did they do that ;-))

I have to mow the lawn, the wife complains about the response time (it takes weeks to get a reply from me ;-). Will hear from you guys later, I am sure ......

Anjo.

Cary Millsap wrote:

>Sure, I'd love to comment...
>
>1. If you can inexpensively cache your whole database working set in
>memory, there's nothing wrong with doing that *unless* you could have
>better spent the resources somewhere else to make a bigger positive
>impact to the business (business = net profit & return on investment &
>cash flow). Does it make a perceptible performance difference for you to
>have your whole database in memory? I can't know without seeing a
>profile of some of your key application sessions, but my experience over
>a few hundred trace files recently tells me, "probably not."
>
><sidebar>Because of the masses of real-life field data we've seen over
>the last two years of collecting people's 10046 trace files, I disagree
>vehemently with the prediction that, "With 64-bit Oracle and terabytes
>of cheap memory, tuning will be a thing of the past." Maybe tuning with
>the buffer cache hit ratio will be a thing of the past (imho, it should
>have become a thing of the past in 1992 when Oracle created 10046 data).
>But 99%+ of the application inefficiencies that I see today will be *no*
>faster--zero percent--when they're made memory-resident.</sidebar>
>
>2. Having your entire database is in memory is no guarantee that your
>users' performance will be adequate. We see lots of applications that do
>*zero* PIOs, but that consume *hours* of 1GHz CPU time because they do
>so many LIOs. ...Cache hit ratios at 100.0%, full-table scans at zero,
>but performance at absolutely intolerable. The goal is not a bunch of
>ratios in their "green zones." The goal is a system that provides
>maximum business value.
>
>3. It is the performance analyst's job to *know*your*business* well
>enough to know where response time improvement will help the most. THE
>SYSTEM CANNOT TELL YOU THIS. What if nobody's complaining about lousy
>performance? Take a user to lunch. Buy someone a sandwich and ask the
>simple question, "If I could make one thing faster today, what would
>most improve your time on Earth with this application?" Every time you
>ask this, a user will point your nose at Response Time. When you go back
>to work after lunch, you had better *keep* your nose pointed at Response
>Time. If you don't know how to measure or optimize Response Time, then
>take Anjo or me to lunch (:\). Pursuing the optimization of *anything*
>other than Response Time is reliable only in creating the illusion of
>progress, if that. If you're not communicating with users and
>specifically targeting their important Response Times, then you're not
>optimizing performance.
>
>4. Finally, there's no such thing as an app in which you have "no
>control over the SQL." Even if you're still on RBO, you have some
>control over the schema (ability create/drop/rebuild indexes). If you're
>on CBO, you have absolute control over database statistics (I like
>Jonathan Lewis' proposal: consider telling the database its statistics
>[dbms_stats.set_%_stats] instead of asking it for them). With 8.1.6 and
>above, you have stored outlines, which give you enormous control over
>which plans the optimizer chooses (even with RBO, which we demonstrate
>in our class). And with meaningful statistics to prove the case, I've
>found vendors responsive to constructive suggestions that improve
>performance of their products noticeably for their entire revenue base.
>
>
>Cary Millsap
>Hotsos Enterprises, Ltd.
>http://www.hotsos.com
>
>Upcoming events:
>- Hotsos Clinic, Oct 1-3 San Francisco, Oct 15-17 Dallas, Dec 9-11
>Honolulu
>- 2003 Hotsos Symposium on OracleR System Performance, Feb 9-12 Dallas
>- Next event: NCOAUG Training Day, Aug 16 Chicago
>
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>Rich
>Sent: Thursday, August 08, 2002 5:29 PM
>To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
>
>Hi Cary,
>
>This comment made me think. I agree in most cases, but what about a
>very
>small DB situation where the buffer cache is larger than all the tables
>and
>indexes combined (~300MB)? This is for a 3rd party tool of which we
>have no
>control over the SQL. I sized the buffer cache as a guesstimate of load
>on
>concurrent usage in the near future. As it turns out, the amount of
>data in
>the DB seems to be relatively low, so theoretically, all accessed data
>and
>indexes could be buffered.
>
>My kneejerk is that seems somehow wrong, but I can't think of a downside
>offhand. Care to comment?
>
>Always willing to learn,
>Rich Jesse System/Database Administrator
>Rich.Jesse_at_qtiworld.com Quad/Tech International, Sussex, WI
>USA
>
>-----Original Message-----
>Sent: Thursday, August 08, 2002 5:05 PM
>To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
>
>* If you have a really high database buffer cache hit ratio (>99%), then
>you
>almost certainly have inefficient SQL in your application.
>
>Cary Millsap
>Hotsos Enterprises, Ltd.
>http://www.hotsos.com
>

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