Optimizing Oracle Performance

Chapter 4. Targeting the Right Improvement Activity

When you have collected properly scoped diagnostic data for some targeted user actions, it’s time to figure out how to repair the problem:

Execute the candidate optimization activity that will have the greatest net payoff to the business. If even the best net-payoff activity produces insufficient net payoff, then suspend your performance improvement activities until something changes.

Performing this task well requires thinking in two distinctly different fields. First, there’s the job that everyone knows about: the technical job of figuring out which changes might cause performance improvement. The analysis that you might not have expected is the job of predicting the financial impact of each change. This is the job that many performance analysts don’t do very well (most analysts don’t do it very well because they don’t try to do it at all). It is the job that is almost impossible to perform with conventional “Oracle tuning” methods. But by not predicting the financial impact of a change before you make it, you lose the ability to make well-informed performance improvement decisions that suit the priorities of your business.

A New Standard of Customer Care

In many ways, Oracle performance analysis is still in its infancy. The age of response time-based optimization methods—ushered in by the likes of Juan Loaiza, Roderick Mañalac, Anjo Kolk, and Shari Yamaguchi—is certainly a big technical leap forward. But technical advances represent ...