RE: historical performance tool for oracle and/or sql server?

  • From: "Niall Litchfield" <n-litchfield@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <oracle-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Mon, 08 Mar 2004 10:17:17 +0000

Hi Mogens

> There are so many things I need to learn about ex-wives, 
> databases and 
> snapshots of data. If we leave the two first topics for now, would 
> anybody care to tell me what kind of conclusive thoughts it's 
> possible 
> to derive from comparing two cumulative snapshots, except 
> that they're y
> different and that most numbers will be higher in one and 
> lower in another?
> 
> Iff - only iff - there's one job/session running while taking the 
> snapshot(s), then it might be possible to conclude something 
> about that 
> job/session. But otherwise?

To play devils advocate for a small while, I think that while 2 such reports 
will be in general meaningless, a collection for a reasonable length of time 
(read > 42 snapshots) might have the following uses. 

1. Abrupt changes in overall 'efficiency' stats can be a good indicator of 
change. A hangover from my support days is the tendency to ask first 'what has 
changed', unfortunately this gets interpreted as 'what did you change you good 
for nothing little....' and so tends to get answered with 'Nothing - it's the 
database'. If you can say well in february we got these figures but from march 
the 1st we got these the user might suddenly recall that oh yes we just loaded 
2004/5 budgets and released the management reports based on them to end users.
2. SLAs tend to be driven by easily graphable and measurable stats (rather than 
for example performance requirements). A repository of these makes producing 
SLA data easier (of course getting yapppack in there might help). 
3. Not all databases are instrumented the same way, so it might be 'useful' for 
management to receive the same information in the same way across all platforms 
that the shop runs. 
4. It keeps the dba employed :)

In other words one can use stats and graphs for more uses than just problem 
resolution. 

True story. In December I asked the manager responsible for what we have 
classed as our core business apps the following question. 

"Do we have a list of key business processes that our corporate systems run 
periodically (I'm thinking invoicing,new starters etc). What I'd like to do is 
make a list of these processes (if one doesn't already exist from <REMOVED> or 
upgrade checklists) and see if we can get some meaningful benchmarking and 
performance monitoring stats going for these systems."

To date no such processes have been identified to me. To my knowledge no such 
list exists. They do have CPU utilisation and availability stats though and are 
happy with them for some reason. I don't think that this is an especially 
unusual position to be in. in fact we might be unusual in explicitly 
identifying core business applications. 



Niall Litchfield
Oracle DBA
Audit Commission
+44 117 975 7805 



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