Optimizing Oracle Performance: A Practitioner's Guide to Optimizing Response Time

by Cary Millsap, Jeffrey Holt

Overview

Oracle system performance inefficiencies often go undetected for months or even years—even under intense scrutiny—because traditional Oracle performance analysis methods and tools are fundamentally flawed. They're unreliable and inefficient. Oracle DBAs and developers are all too familiar with the outlay of time and resources, blown budgets, missed deadlines, and marginally effective performance fiddling that is commonplace with traditional methods of Oracle performance tuning. In this crucial book, Cary Millsap, former VP of Oracle's System Performance Group, clearly and concisely explains how to use Oracle's response time statistics to diagnose and repair performance problems. Cary also shows how "queueing theory" can be applied to response time statistics to predict the impact of upgrades and other system changes. Optimizing Oracle Performance eliminates the time-consuming, trial-and-error guesswork inherent in most conventional approaches to tuning. You can determine exactly where a system's performance problem is, and with equal importance, where it is not, in just a few minutes—even if the problem is several years old. Optimizing Oracle Performance cuts a path through the complexity of current tuning methods, and streamlines an approach that focuses on optimization techniques that any DBA can use quickly and successfully to make noticeable—even dramatic—improvements. For example, the one thing database users care most about is response time. Naturally, DBAs focus much of their time and effort towards improving response time. But it is entirely too easy to spend hundreds of hours to improve important system metrics such as hit ratios, average latencies, and wait times, only to find users are unable to perceive the difference. And an expensive hardware upgrade may not help either. It doesn't have to be that way. Technological advances have added impact, efficiency, measurability, predictive capacity, reliability, speed, and practicality to the science of Oracle performance optimization. Optimizing Oracle Performance shows you how to slash the frustration and expense associated with unraveling the true root cause of any type of performance problem, and reliably predict future performance. The price of this essential book will be paid back in hours saved the first time its methods are used.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780596005276
Publisher:	O'Reilly Media, Incorporated
Publication date:	09/01/2003
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	416
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.19(h) x 0.98(d)

About the Author

Cary Millsap is the former Vice President of Oracle's System Performance Group and the cofounder of Hotsos, a company dedicated to Oracle system performance. Hotsos provides performance-improvement tools for Oracle environments and also delivers training in the form of clinics and symposiums. Cary is also a founding member of the Oak Table Network (http://www.oaktable.net), an informal association of "Oracle Scientists" well known throughout the Oracle community.

Jeff Holt is one of the world's most productive Oracle performance optimization specialists. He has tremendous experience in constructing training programs and software tools to optimize the system performance management process. He is a former support analyst and consultant at Oracle Corporation, where he served as a technology leader in the System Performance Group. He is the Hotsos Tools lead designer and developer, the author of several technical papers, a Hotsos founding employee, and a Hotsos Clinic principal developer.

Table of Contents

Dedication; Foreword; Preface; Why I Wrote This Book; Audience for This Book; Structure of This Book; Which Platform and Version?; What This Book Is and Is Not; About the Tools, Examples, and Exercises; Citations; Conventions Used in This Book; Comments and Questions; Acknowledgments; Part I: Method; Chapter 1: A Better Way to Optimize; 1.1 “You’re Doing It Wrong”; 1.2 Requirements of a Good Method; 1.3 Three Important Advances; 1.4 Tools for Analyzing Response Time; 1.5 Method R; Chapter 2: Targeting the Right User Actions; 2.1 Specification Reliability; 2.2 Making a Good Specification; 2.3 Specification Over-Constraint; Chapter 3: Targeting the Right Diagnostic Data; 3.1 Expectations About Data Collection; 3.2 Data Scope; 3.3 Oracle Diagnostic Data Sources; 3.4 For More Information; Chapter 4: Targeting the Right Improvement Activity; 4.1 A New Standard of Customer Care; 4.2 How to Find the Economically Optimal Performance Improvement Activity; 4.3 Making Sense of Your Diagnostic Data; 4.4 Forecasting Project Net Payoff; Part II: Reference; Chapter 5: Interpreting Extended SQL Trace Data; 5.1 Trace File Walk-Through; 5.2 Extended SQL Trace Data Reference; 5.3 Response Time Accounting; 5.4 Evolution of the Response Time Model; 5.5 Walking the Clock; 5.6 Forward Attribution; 5.7 Detailed Trace File Walk-Through; 5.8 Exercises; Chapter 6: Collecting Extended SQL Trace Data; 6.1 Understanding Your Application; 6.2 Activating Extended SQL Trace; 6.3 Finding Your Trace File(s); 6.4 Eliminating Collection Error; 6.5 Exercises; Chapter 7: Oracle Kernel Timings; 7.1 Operating System Process Management; 7.2 Oracle Kernel Timings; 7.3 How Software Measures Itself; 7.4 Unaccounted-for Time; 7.5 Measurement Intrusion Effect; 7.6 CPU Consumption Double-Counting; 7.7 Quantization Error; 7.8 Time Spent Not Executing; 7.9 Un-Instrumented Oracle Kernel Code; 7.10 Exercises; Chapter 8: Oracle Fixed View Data; 8.1 Deficiencies of Fixed View Data; 8.2 Fixed View Reference; 8.3 Useful Fixed View Queries; 8.4 The Oracle “Wait Interface”; 8.5 Exercises; Chapter 9: Queueing Theory for the Oracle Practitioner; 9.1 Performance Models; 9.2 Queueing; 9.3 Queueing Theory; 9.4 The M/M/m Queueing Model; 9.5 Perspective; 9.6 Exercises; Part III: Deployment; Chapter 10: Working the Resource Profile; 10.1 How to Work a Resource Profile; 10.2 How to Forecast Improvement; 10.3 How to Tell When Your Work Is Done; Chapter 11: Responding to the Diagnosis; 11.1 Beyond the Resource Profile; 11.2 Response Time Components; 11.3 Eliminating Wasteful Work; 11.4 Attributes of a Scalable Application; Chapter 12: Case Studies; 12.1 Case 1: Misled by System-Wide Data; 12.2 Case 2: Large CPU Service Duration; 12.3 Case 3: Large SQL*Net Event Duration; 12.4 Case 4: Large Read Event Duration; 12.5 Conclusion; Part IV: Appendixes; Appendix A: Greek Alphabet; Appendix B: Optimizing Your Database Buffer Cache Hit Ratio; Appendix C: M/M/m Queueing Theory Formulas; Appendix D: References; Colophon;