Oracle® Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence Solutions

Chapter 9. Data Warehouse Performance Tuning and Monitoring

Let the celebration begin — your team has delivered superior functionality that will provide your organization with needed insight into business operations despite shifting requirements. You likely encountered challenges such as lack of stewardship and suspect data quality. But, your next challenge is that what appeared to be a successful implementation is now in jeopardy as variability in performance and unpredictable service levels begin to overshadow your success. This is not uncommon where a data warehouse solution provides new or enhanced capabilities.

One of the highest risk factors to the long-term success of a data warehouse initiative is performance. Yet the characterization of performance is as much about managing its perception as it is in solving the complexities of hardware, software, and varying business workloads. Business users expect results of queries to return in a predictable and consistent manner when compared with previous interactions and solutions. Although an abundance of features and functions in hardware and software give the developer many design choices that can ensure consistent performance, the key to ensuring the highest levels of business user satisfaction is a comprehensive approach for performance tuning and monitoring.

In this chapter, we will discuss a top-down approach to performance tuning and highlight the key areas for monitoring your data warehouse. In addition, we will use a previously ...