Forecasting Oracle Performance

CHAPTER 8Ratio Modeling

In some cases, a low-precision forecast is not only useful and appropriate, but also vitally necessary. Imagine the following four situations:

• You just arrived at the office and your boss informs you the budget for next year's hardware purchases is due today, by close of business.
• While you are in the meeting, a hardware vendor recommends that you purchase the vendor's newest and most powerful server. While it sounds great, you want to quickly do a "sanity check" just to make sure the vendor's claims are reasonable.
• You are a CRM software development company that must quickly "size the system" for your prospects. This occurs as part of the sales cycle, and you don't have a lot of time. But you must somehow responsibly ...