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Tuning is important to any computing environment, but actually tuning the individual SQL statements in a relational database (such as Oracle) can have a profound impact on application and overall system performance. Locating problem SQL, in itself, can be a challenge. Tuning the Oracle environment and tuning SQL statements is the topic of Chapter 24, “Oracle8 Database Tuning.” There are many product offerings to aid the developer or DBA in finding and correcting problem SQL.
Bradmark Technology, Inc.’s SQL Performance Tuner has several features: to locate problem SQL, collect statistics by system, by user, or by object, and once identified, explain and tune the SQL statements. More information on this and other tools from Bradmark Technology is available from their Web site at www.Bradmark.com.
Platinum Technology, Inc.’s SQL*Station is actually a bundle of four tools: coder (PL/SQL development), debugger (symbolic PL/SQL debugger), code manager (version control and deployment), and Plan Analyzer. Plan Analyzer is a powerful Explain Plan tool capable of tuning and comparing both the rule-based and cost-based (first-row and all-rows) optimizer SQL execution plans, displaying valuable cost, and row and byte-count per-row in the explain plan. It has an interactive ability to add hints as well as many features to capture problem SQL, reports, and compares. More information on this and other tools from Platinum Technology is available from their Web site at www.Platinum.com.
Quest Software’s SQLab is another offering in the SQL tuning arena. SQLab has features that discover and document problem SQL regardless of its originating application as well as tuning features. More information on this and other tools from Quest Software is available from their Web site at www.Quests.com.
Monitoring the Oracle environment is simply a necessity to many shops. As discussed in Chapter 19, “Oracle8 Administrative Requirements,” there are three primary reasons for monitoring: proactive problem resolution, tuning issues, and trend analysis. Monitoring needs to happen all the time, not just when the response time is slow. Sometimes the Oracle environment is running just fine, from an Oracle point of view. Sometimes issues involving performance, such as memory swapping, cannot be monitored from an Oracle-based monitor.
Bradmark Technology, Inc.’s DB General Performance Monitoring monitors the Oracle RDBMS environment. Like most monitoring tools, DB General Performance Monitoring has a variety of scans and archives collected metrics and can notify the proper personnel in a variety of manners: email, pagers, SNMP messaging, and so on. The scans can be as broad as monitoring server metrics or as precise as individual SQL statements. This tool supports all three primary reasons for monitoring mentioned above. More information on this and other tools from Bradmark Technology is available from their Web site at www.Bradmark.com.
Platinum Technology’s Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) monitors the server environment (UNIX, NT, OS/2), the Oracle environment, non-Oracle database environments, and the network environment, all from the background, for hundreds of servers, doing alarming, notification (paging, email, snmp, and so on), and corrective actions without having to have a console online. All monitoring is viewable from a single console, with no special languages to be learned to add functionality. EPM is powerful for all three needed monitoring: proactively monitors and alerts the right personnel (or corrects the problem), displays tuning metrics from the server, database, and network point of view, and stores historical information for trend analysis. All scans have extensive drill-down capabilities to view the detail level. Drill-downs include seeing who is causing a lock, the SQL statement level (with Explain Plan), physical disk I/O, what UNIX processes are being swapped, MTS, dispatcher load, to object management, and so on. EPM has low system overhead, which makes it perfect for any computing environment. It even comes with a character-mode console for problem resolution remotely. EPM supports over 200 scan types for the Oracle8 RDBMS.
Quest Software AdHawk Monitor is a client-side Oracle monitoring product. AdHawk Monitor has a graphical console that utilizes SQL*Net for connectivity to the Oracle environment. This console gives AdHawk Monitor the ability to see system and user activity, drilling down to more detailed levels of information, including the actual SQL statements. AdHawk Monitor has the ability to make recommendations. More information on this and other tools from Quest Software is available from their Web site at www.Quests.com.
The objective of this chapter was to familiarize the reader with the many tools available to the Oracle8 server. I discussed all of the server-side tools including Server Manager, Export/Import, SQL*Loader, SQL*Plus, and several tools available from third-party software vendors.
Tools represented in this chapter appeared in alphabetical order. Additional information about each of the vendors listed in this chapter can be found at the following Internet Web sites:
My hope is that you can utilize the skills and the tools referenced here to make your administrative tasks simpler.
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