Newbie seeking help on performance tuning - Oracle 7.3 Server, NT4, Dual PPro 180, 64Meg

Hello.

Dual PPro 180, 64Meg, SCSI 2 gig (decent speed) NT4 Server, Oracle 7.3 for NT, IIS3

A 20meg database, containing strings and integers.

Web part calls SQL through ODBC, and right now my most significant problem is that some SQL calls takes forever to to finish (e.g. 30secs). I have solved some of the problems by creating indexes, however when I do calls like:

select * from table where first_name like '%john%'

takes 9 seconds. I noticed that the 2 CPUs are like 5% so the bottle neck should not be the processors. Oracle doesn't seem to use the first_name index at all for the above SQL.

Same SQL being called the second time doesn't really improve at all.

I tried to increase RAM hoping to improve caching but oracle doesn't seem to use the additional RAM.

Any comments on how to start would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks a million in advance. Received on Thu May 08 1997 - 00:00:00 CDT