Re: Slightly-OT: Throw HW at a SW/DB problem

  • From: Hans Forbrich <fuzzy.graybeard@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Mon, 27 Jun 2011 12:21:44 -0600

One thing to keep in the back of one's mind is that "THAI Tuning" ("Throw Hardware At It") IS a valid tuning technique. It is one of the many tools in the toolkit that we need to be able to use.
I remember an app at a customer site some years ago - basic problem was the creation of the 11th concurrent Oracle instance on a 512MB HP-UX machine. (Found a bug in the HP-UX 10 swap algorithm with that one.) The solution was indeed THAI, specifically a new server.
Unfortunately, it is often invoked (often without thought or reason) much too early in the tuning cycle. And some people believe that it is the only tool that needs to be used.
Yet, it is possible that at some future time, the Oracle cost-based optimizer will be smart enough and perhaps adaptive enough to automatically make appropriate use of hardware changes. Until then, I am reminded of Mr. Milsap's excellent story related to THAI Tuning causing further degradation.
In the article, the author writes that a 4 hour process was reduced to 12 minutes by traditional tuning. However, the original 4 hour process was also dropped to 12 minutes by replacing the disks with SSD. My first thought is that the article misses some crucial information, such as perhaps "SSD was also used for paging/swap" or "indexes not previously seen were now also on the SSD" or something else. Another thought is that the article never indicates the original bottleneck and therefore does not provide sufficient information to come to ANY conclusion.
As others have mentioned: to exclusively turn to THAI Tuning, as implied by the article, is - let's just say, that is where consulting opportunities come from. As long as management is willing to believe in magic, magicians will have a job. 

/Hans


On 27/06/2011 8:45 AM, Rich Jesse wrote:

I think I'm gonna be sick:

http://www.sqlmag.com/article/Performancetuning/ssds-performance-tuning-experts-milkman-139591

This mentality **in a database professional** completely escapes me.  It
brings to mind that I just "upgraded" my Blackberry to one that has 2x the
CPU and 5x the RAM -- and still works just as bad as the one it replaced (if
not worse).

Anyone from the Oracle camp advocating/predicting hardware-based "tuning"?

Rant over.

Rich

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