| Lesson 4 | Developing a performance tuning plan |
| Objective | Develop a plan for long-term Oracle tuning. |
Developing Performance Tuning plan
Proactive tuning
While reactive tuning involves running a few Oracle scripts and interpreting the results, ongoing proactive tuning
involves tracking changes in performance metrics over time and making planned changes to correct the situation. The Oracle DBA has many choices for accomplishing this goal.
- Use third-party tools to collect Oracle performance data
- Write extensions onto the Oracle utilities that dump the performance data into Oracle tables for later analysis.
Note:Oracle does not offer a standard Oracle utility to capture long-term (or historical) performance
data.
Tuning as an on-going process
In either case, tuning is an ongoing process. A new, empty database may perform far differently than one that has been loaded with data. A system may have completely different performance patterns in
the day than it does at night. In short, you must be able to track changes in Oracle performance and take appropriate actions that benefit the database as a whole.
Monitoring resource consumption over time
There is another benefit to having a long-term performance plan. It is generally the job of the Oracle DBA to monitor the resource consumption of Oracle (disk, memory, and CPU) and notify the systems
administrators in time for them to order enough of the needed resource. Many Oracle DBA performance planning systems include a forecasting function, where the DBA can predict future disk, memory, and
CPU requirements based upon long-term growth patterns. In general, the Oracle DBA simply collects performance information over a long period of time to produce the most accurate forecast of
performance.
As you are collecting performance information, you must have ways to compare and analyze this data. The next lesson will introduce you to setting goals for your database's performance.