Re: Competition for OraPerf

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. I have to ask you, just out of curiosity, have you recently taken a brush-clearing course in Crawford, TX? In the Real World(TM) there are applications that you don't have source code for, legacy applications, departments in turmoil, company acquisitions and such things. Throwing hardware at the problem at hand frequently is the right thing to do. There are situations in which investing significant time and effort to learn and develop is the right thing to do and there are situations in which it is not the right thing to do. I was once working for a medium sized HMO which, at one point, acquired a small HMO. Small HMO has had its members database on a single PC, using SQL server. I used Oracle's migration workbench to stuff things into an Oracle database and the programmers concocted something that emulated the application that was previously running against the SQL server. The result was unacceptably slow. This application had to run only until each member was not properly entered into the buying HMO's Oracle database. After that, the whole thing was quietly extinguished. So, Oracle on a Win2k box wasn't good enough. There were two options:
1) To tune the application properly
2) Create a tablespace and two schemas on the UAT machine, a much

   more powerful IBM midrange computer with EMC storage attached to it    and let the thing perform through the sheer power of the hardware.

I recommended the second solution and everybody was happy. In 4 months, the whole thing went away and I was told to drop the tablespace, which I gladly did. That was throwing hardware at the problem and it was justified. In principle, there are situations in which I will gladly recommend throwing hardware at the problem.

-- 
http://www.mladen-gogala.com