Re: Re[2]: EM access to developers
- From: William Robertson <william@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Oracle-L (E-mail)" <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 31 Jan 2015 17:01:55 +0000
To be fair, when we implemented Resource Manager at my last place all the
CPU above the max line turned green in EM and was labelled something like
"CPU Throttled by Resource Manager", leading to exactly the kind of alarm,
consternation and emergency phone conferences Mark mentioned. Even so, I
still don't believe the solution is to withdraw database monitoring tools
from teams whose job includes monitoring databases.
William Robertson
On 31 Jan 2015, at 15:59, MARK BRINSMEAD <mark.brinsmead@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I can't fault this reasoning. Sharing information is how things are
improved just about anywhere, and certainly in IT.
I still maintain, though, that placing a large amount of *data* into the
hands of people who do not understand how to interpret it is a recipe for
disaster. The sort of disaster I have seen numerous times.
Training and education (along with an actual *will* to learn) are essential
to making this sort of thing successful. Where the resources and the will
exist, I am sure this will be wildly successful. Often I have dreamed of a
world where developers would analyse wait events and tune their own
queries, but in my present reality, I much more frequently hear things like
"I wish you (DBAs) would stop telling me to change my queries, and just
tune the damned database!!".
We all have a common goal -- effective and efficient IT services -- but
sometimes key people in the organiztion (DBAs, network administrators, or
system administrators, for example) are required to play the role of
"guardians" in order to prevent well intentioned people from doing
themselves harm. That can be a really tough balancing act, and one that we
are rarely thanked for performing.
One thing we probably all need is more "DBA" skills (or rather skills that
we have traditionally considered to be DBA skills, like query tuning and
performance management) on the development side of the IT department.
Premature tuning can be a costly mistake, but its usually nowhere near as
costly as letting a system go all the way to production before performance
and scalability are carefully considered.
On Fri, Jan 30, 2015 at 10:29 PM, <kellyn.potvin@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Mladen,
> You proceeded to read one out of about every five words I wrote. Sharing
> knowledge is how we are all more successful. I know a number of developers
> I was told, "they'll never learn any new tricks..." and yet after learning
> how to make the most of performance data, were able to produce better code
> in less time.
>
> For those that asked, EM Express is an excellent performance tool to allow
> Developers to view the resource demands and wait events in database
> environments, but that is a product fully installed on the user database
> and no management agent. It doesn't have many of the management features
> that DBAs liked in it's predecessor, DBConsole, but it was never meant to
> be. With EM12c the product has far grown past just a DBA management tool-
> features like database replay, (RUEI), middleware features, cloud
> management pack features like Database as a Service that let's the DBA
> automate many of the tedious tasks of provisioning and schema refreshes so
> they can be free to do more interesting work that provides the business,
> with a self-service portal for developers, PM's, etc. submitting requests.
> This is so all of IT can be more successful, not just DBAs. Kyle already
> knows this, Delphix offers a similar product as DBaaS, freeing up DBAs so
> they are no longer viewed as roadblocks and lessen resource constraints.
>
> This is not your father's Enterprise Manager.
> Kellyn
>
> Sent from myMail for iOS
>
>
>
> Friday, January 30, 2015, 8:07 PM -0700 from Mladen Gogala <
> dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
>
> Responses in-line:
>
> On 01/30/2015 09:37 PM, kellyn.potvin@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
> >
> >
> > I saw too many IT departments remove DBA roles from their staff
> > because DBAs were viewed as roadblocks to project success.
>
> So have I. The IT departments that have done so have never succeeded, in
> the long run.
>
> > Attend a conference like ODTUG's KSCOPE and you'll hear this story so
> > often from the developers that it will make you realize that the "us
> > vs. them" scenario is making DBAs a liability instead of an asset.
>
> DBA is the guardian of the production database, the person ultimately
> responsible for its performance and availability. If the developer wants
> to put a huge full table scan in an OLTP application and use PQ to
> resolve it quickly, it's the DBA job to prevent that from happening,
> because such query would consume resources needed for other programs. I
> used to work as a production DBA in a companies with several thousands
> of online users, using web applications. If DBA doesn't exercise a tight
> control over the database, performance will ultimately become sluggish
> for everybody. And that is a resume generating event. It's my job to
> prevent that from happening.
>
> > Steven Feuerstein often asks in his sessions, "of the DBAs in here,
> > how many grant access to performance views in Enterprise Manager?" I'm
> > often the only one who raises their hand and the common excuse is, "If
> > we grant them access, then they'll be able to see things" Really.
>
> Of course they will be able to see things, but would they be able to
> interpret them correctly? Performance tuning requires certain training
> and certain mindset. Developers are rarely trained for performance
> tuning. From my experience, they don't show too much interest in the
> performance analysis. You would be surprised to learn how many
> developers still think in terms of buffer cache hit ratios.
>
> >
> > Well, here's the way I see it. No DBA has any excuse for complaining
> > about the quality of code released in production if they aren't
> > willing to provide developers and testing the same access to view
> > performance data in tools such as Enterprise Manager as they have.
>
> Why is that? What would you achieve by giving an access to trace files
> to the person who doesn't know how to analyze them? What would you
> achieve by giving access to all those performance monitors to the people
> who are not sure how to interpret them? Instead of a diagnosis we would
> get a debate about the meaning of the monitoring data.
>
> > With more and more companies moving towards Agile, more companies
> > using scrum masters/scrum collaboration, it is essential for everyone
> > to understand the challenges they are up against and truly work as a
> team.
>
> Agile is frequently used incorrectly and becomes the source of the
> problem. The financial appeal of Agile is cutting the costs of QA. The
> end result is frequently spewing large quantities of code, without DBA
> being able to influence it. About 3 years ago, I resigned my DBA
> position at a company which was doing Agile, precisely because of that.
> There was an application code in the SYS schema. I am not a big fan of
> Agile.
>
> --
> Mladen Gogala
> Oracle DBA
> http://mgogala.freehostia.com
>
> --
> //www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l
>
>
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