Oracle-L: RE: Dealing with 3rd Party Applications

From: DENNIS WILLIAMS <DWILLIAMS_at_LIFETOUCH.COM>
Date: Wed, 26 Feb 2003 15:44:14 -0800
Message-ID: <F001.0055AB99.20030226154414@fatcity.com>

Dick - I would like to point out the reason the vendors don't have good Oracle people working their help desk. You would be quite qualified -- would you be willing to work the help desk? I'll bet not! Neither would I. So those best qualified for a job won't take it . . . hmmm.

Then the other part is that the help desk represents one of the vendor's biggest expenses. If it is not well managed, the company can easily go broke. So they have to make sure everyone is overloaded and underpaid. Development is a different situation because a top developer can build you a better mousetrap that will put you ahead of your competitors. Better help desk people are good, but then the word gets out and every novice calls them directly with their RTFM questions. If I've offended someone on the list that works a help desk, my apologies. We need you, especially the good ones and often you go beyond the call of duty.

Dennis Williams
DBA, 40%OCP, 100% DBA
Lifetouch, Inc.
dwilliams_at_lifetouch.com

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Wednesday, February 26, 2003 4:44 PM To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

Jeff,

Let's see, the sys admin installed all of it right? Therefore it MUST be
the sys admin's problem. END OF CONVERSATION.

Now I'm sure the boss isn't going to like that very much, mine would not.
So we re-install the database MY way. Most of the time the problems disappear
easily. Otherwise, have the users pay for a vendor consultant to come in & tell
the sys admin that he messed up.

Right now we're having a problem with a third party help desk application
that does a bad job cleaning up connections. The vendor recommended setting processes = 20000 in the init.ora file & restart the instance every 24 hours.
The help desk manager asked me what I thought of that, you can imagine the response. Anyway, we're now in MTS mode & the problem has been pushed back to
the vendor with the "you want us to do WHAT???? Are you crazy??" response. It's
a shame that vendors don't have Oracle trained people working for them!!

Dick Goulet

PS: If your using a telecom management software product from a company in Manchester NH, USA, consider yourself LUCKY. They have some real talented Oracle certified DBA's with experience working for them. They also don't create
these types of problems.

____________________Reply Separator____________________
Author: "Eberhard; Jeff" <Jeff.Eberhard_at_Rolls-RoyceGS.com>
Date:       2/26/2003 12:43 PM

Hi,

So my boss comes over this morning and tells me that the users are having a performance problem with a 3rd party application that have recently began using. This is an oracle database where they bought the software and had the system admin install the software which included the vendors instruction of creating and setting up the database (basically use the defaults). It is an Oracle 8.1.7 database on Windows 2000. He wants me to find out "if you can create some indexes or something", etc. (he likes to give solutions before the cause if discovered).

Anyway, I decide to take a look at it. The performance they are complaining about is when they log into the application it takes about a minute for their initial screen (which includes a list of values) to appear. I use the tool that someone posted here a while ago, SQL Monitor from www.fastalgo.com, and find that during the time the user is waiting for the first screen the application is executing a sql statement about 2200 times.

The SQL is: SELECT PARENTID FROM PROC_ WHERE PROCEDUREID=:1 The bind variable is different for each execution with appears to be the procedureid values from the table proc_. Table proc_ has 2203 rows. I check the executions for the sql text in v$sqlarea. Executions = 58,825. (aha, I think this is the problem).
I explain plan the query and find that it is using the primary key index.

My tuning skills are still pretty basic. Since I have no control over the application is there anything I can do to increase the performance of running the query thousands of times?

Also how do you usually deal with 3rd party application issues like this? 95% of our databases/applications are from 3rd party vendors and it's a pain trying to get them performing better.

Thanks,
Jeff Eberhard

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Author: Eberhard, Jeff
INET: Jeff.Eberhard_at_Rolls-RoyceGS.com

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INET: dgoulet_at_vicr.com

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