RE: performance questions

Sai,

To quote part of an excellent article from the 'Goddess' on SLAs: (titled: Managing User Expectations with Service Level Agreements)

"When people talk about availability, the discussion almost always begins with hardware. Numbers and sizes of servers, disk arrays, communication lines and, on occasion, additional physical data center sites. Once the hardware is out of the way, the talk turns to software. Do we have a backup of our data? What about the programs that we use to manipulate and/or access the information?"

She then goes ahead to bust a number of myths and give you the low-down. The article is a 'protected' one at IOUG's SELECT Online, so you can either join IOUG (a good idea IMHO not only for many more such articles, but also be part of a group that can make a difference) or request the Goddess for a copy.

John Kanagaraj
Oracle Applications DBA
DBSoft Inc
(W): 408-970-7002

Great, uplifting music - http://www.klove.com

• The opinions and statements above are entirely my own and not those of my employer or clients **

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Monday, June 02, 2003 10:05 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

hi gurus

this is a kind of query i have faced a few times in the recent past and which has really forced me to start this thread.

as everyone knows, there is always what we call a SLA or in other words a service level agreement (may be called differently in different places) which infact means defining a time for any transaction to go thru in the database. This is very important in emvironments which handle transactions affecting sales or just normal queries against huge databases which helps a sales force or a front office customer support force.. Defining this is always a difficult task and i believe will keep changing as time goes on - factors like number of records,the number of databases running on a box(probably SLA was defined initially on a single box-single db kind of env and now the same box has more databases),memory,network,disk performance,number of transactions or can i say the load profile et al. there have been cases where i have been asked questions like why this query took more time than SLA when it was running ok sometime back. i find it very difficult to convince saying that ther! e are factors affecting this and not just explain plan et al(correct me if i am wrong) or in other words a scenario that says my test environment is running faster than prod
(everything on the db side are the same except the way the disks are
configured or the load profile on both dbs).

here is my question? is there a way to determine this SLA. since it keeps changing how do we really determine it. there is a soltuion that comes right out saying abenchmark can help u do this but how do we extrapolate or assume that there was no benchmark done at the beginning how do we validate/dtermine this magic number.
i have some ideas on this but nothing is very concrete.

can someone give me some feedback on this..if u feel that this is not a right question to be put in this forum i apologize but i would like to take this up with someone who is interested and i wouldnt use this mailing list for the same.

thanks for ur time
sai

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Author: John Kanagaraj
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