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Performance Problems Can Come from Anywhere

Do you know where software performance problems come from? They can come from anywhere:

• They can come from badly written code, from SQL or PL/SQL or PHP or C# or Ruby;
• They can come from too many index segments, or too few, or a bad decision about your data model or how your schema was implemented;
• They can come from inadequate hardware capacity, or a bad RAID controller, or a mistake in how your SAN caches are configured;
• They can come from a badly set parameter on your OS or database or application server or web server;
• They can come from a user who mentally filters through 10,000 rows of results because she doesn’t know there's a one-click way to get the one row she really wants;

They can come from anywhere. It’s a big problem.

How Do You Find and Prevent Problems?

There’s a rich Oracle history of trying to find performance problems in perhaps the most inefficient possible way: by looking everywhere they might come from. But because performance problems can come from anywhere, neither you nor your software can possibly monitor and make sense of data coming from everywhere your performance problems might be coming from. You can’t prevent problems this way either: you can’t possibly know everything there is about all the layers in a complex stack of hardware, software, and personnel, before you take an application live. Does an application developer really have to know everything there is to know about Oracle redo and undo and freelists and IOTs before he can write great code that uses an Oracle Database?

There’s a much better way.

I’m a firm believer in the Method R strategy for performance tuning as it has worked well for me countless times over the years.

Steve Montgomerie · Sr. Oracle/PeopleSoft DBA · Siemens Corporation

The Way Out: Profiling

A profile is a report of exactly how your system spends your user’s time. It’s how you answer simple-sounding business questions like these:

• That click takes 20 seconds now. It used to take .5. Why?
• That report took 2 hours. Could it run in 10 minutes?

As simple as these questions sound, you can’t answer them with the tools you use today. That’s why managing performance is way more difficult for you than it needs to be.

Profiling is what DBAs and sysadmins do in production when a program takes longer than we want, or when we just wonder if it could go faster. Profiling is what developers with good code hygiene do before they hand their code to the next person in the software lifecycle, to make sure their code is as tight and fast as possible—to make sure they didn’t do anything inefficient that might be particularly embarrassing under load.

We’ve always had trace files, but most developers do not know how to read them. The Profiler makes things very easy and gives me the evidence I need to demonstrate the problem is in the code, not the database.

Dorrie Keyes · DBA Manager · Indianapolis, Indiana

We Get It: Profiling is Hard

With the wrong tools, profiling is a nightmare. Profiling with Oracle Enterprise Manager or Oracle’s Active Session History data (if you’re lucky enough to have a license for it) is impossible. The data you need is in your Oracle trace data, but collecting trace data can be difficult. Even if you’ve cracked the collection problems, retrieving trace files can be a pain in the neck, especially for developers and analysts who don’t have login access to the system they’re trying to fix. And making sense of trace files without the right tools can make you go blind. Yet Oracle’s tkprof leaves so much to be desired...

Profiling Doesn’t Need to be Difficult

The Method R Toolbox pairs of our easiest-to-use trace data collection and retrieval tool and our easiest-to-use profiling tool. The result: you’ll finally find out where all those programs have been hiding your time. You’ll have the tools that many of our customers have used to systematically eliminate waste from their systems, to save enormous heartache and strife. And heat, and electricity, and cash. With our Toolbox, you’ll be able to explain Oracle application response times in a manner that database administrators, developers, users, and managers alike can relate to. Imagine: “Here’s where all of your time has been going...” The Method R Toolbox is performance management software that you need, whether you’re live right now or still building, whether you’re running custom software or software off-the-shelf.

When you combine MR Trace and the Profiler, we’ve been able to turn around fixes with almost no interruptions and have taken warehouse queries that used to never finish down to less than ten minutes.

Bernard Antonuk · Orion Data Management

What’s In the Package

Here’s what you get in the Method R Toolbox software package:

• Method R Trace: 1-person license, including maintenance
• Method R Profiler: 1-person, 2-instance license, including maintenance

The Fine Print

Here are the definitions of the Method R Software Licensing terms. Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.

Per-Person License. A Software Per-Person License restricts the number of people who can run the Software. Each Software Per-Person License unit entitles one specific person to run the specified Software on any system, using any login id. With a Per-Person license, the distribution contains the licensed software for all the platforms we support.

Per-Userid License. A Software Per-Userid License restricts the number of Userids that a licensed person can use to run the Software. Each Per-Userid License unit entitles one specific person to run the specified Software within exactly one Userid. A Userid is defined to be a single login account on a single physical or virtual computer. A person can thus act in the capacity of multiple Userids. For example, one person using two different login accounts on each of three different physical or virtual computers would count as six (2 + 2 + 2 = 6) Userids. With a Per-Userid license, the distribution contains the licensed software for only one platform of the licensee’s choice.

Per-Instance License. A Software Per-Instance License restricts the number of Oracle Instances that a licensed person is permitted to analyze with the Software. Each Per-Instance License unit entitles one specific person to run the specified Software to analyze exactly one Instance. An Instance is defined as a single collection of Oracle background processes and memory buffers as defined in Oracle Corporation’s Database Concepts documentation. For example, a group of users using the Software to analyze a single-instance development system, and a single-instance test system, and a 3-node RAC system would count as five (1 + 1 + 3 = 5) Instances.

Maintenance License. An active Maintenance License entitles a licensee to download and install, at no additional fee, all new versions of the specified Software (for the licensed platforms) that are released within eleven (11) months from the date of purchase. To download and install a version released after this period requires an additional fee.

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