Frits Hoogland came up with a very interesting project — Pgstatspack.

What can be better than a Statspack-like tool an Oracle DBA in the PostgreSQL world? Heh… right — only PostgreSQL Wait Interface. Oh well, Pgstatspack is a good start. Well done Frits!

Well, the guess-days might be just about over for SQL Server DBA’s. People who revolutionized Oracle performance tuning several years ago, are now working at SQL Server revolution.

Look what Anjo Kolk had to say about at the interview during Miracle SQL Server Open World 2008:

And here is Cary Millsap from the same event:
Continue reading ‘SQL Server Performance Diagnostic — Still Guessing?’

ASH Masters is the new web-site about Oracle Active Session History and everything around it. There, you can leave your comments and questions about ASH and ASHMON, the tool designed after Performance page of Oracle 10g Enterprise Manager. Kyle Hailey is the one who designed this performance screen in Oracle 10g Enterprise Manager and ASH data is what’s used behind the scene. Thanks to Kyle and others, we now have ASH Masters.

But not only Kyle created ASHMON. He has provided the ASH Simulation package for those of us who are still running Oracle 9i or have no license on Diagnostic Pack for Oracle 10g. The dream has come true!

For those of you who prefer good old SQL prompt and feel more comfortable using “hard core” queries, there are some ready to use queries. This is also the right place to share your ideas how to use ASH and contribute your queries for the community. Because…

What goes round comes round. Ideas build off ideas. No inventor is an island to themselves. We all build of existing ideas or are inspired by current ideas, but when there is discussion, sharing and community the ideas can grow faster, be more fun and become more powerful.

Join ASH Masters — share your experience and ideas.

Earlier this week I’ve attended RMOUG Training Days 2008 and one of the sessions was of particular interest. Mogens initiated very heated discussion about performance tuning methods that are currently in use and how inappropriate they all are because they still leave some chance for guesswork. No doubts that performance optimization has involved significantly in the recent years but there is still place for a lot of improvements. Thanks Mogens — you are invaluable BAAG supporter!

Daniel Fink was one of the presenters during that session and has done an interesting follow up. You probably know that couple month ago Dan expressed controversial idea that Oracle “wait interface is nearly useless”. My interpretation is that while wait interface removed a great deal of guesswork from performance troubleshooting, there is still a lot of times when analysts tend to rely on guesswork or don’t have other ways to go forward except educational guessing.

Now back to Dan’s most recent post — How useful are diagnostic/optimization tools?. I can’t agree more about incompleteness of performance tuning tools but can they ever be complete?
Continue reading ‘Can a Performance Tuning Tool be Complete?’