Managing Server Sprawl With AWS Management Console Alerts

This blog focuses on database monitoring and management using the AWS CloudWatch service. CloudWatch ingests performance data from a wide range of AWS resources, applications and services, sends alerts when needed, and keeps a 15-day historical record of performance information.

Oracle In-memory Database—Speed and Simplicity Meet Up. Have you tried it out yet?

One of the major announcements Oracle made during the Open World was the launch of Oracle In Memory Database Option. The In-Memory option to Oracle Database 12c is 100 percent compatible with existing applications and leverages all existing Oracle Database functionality. At first look, some key benefits jump out: Though this is a paid option, […]

Query Rewrite: What is MySQL Doing To My Queries?

The Impact of Query Rewrite on MySQL Query Optimization When processing a query, every relational database vendor takes a number of similar steps to parse, validate, and optimize a query. MySQL does the following: Validates the query syntax — does it use valid operators, are the clauses in the proper order, etc. Validates the query […]

Why I Avoid Database Hints: a followup

In an earlier blog post about database hints, I gave a number of reasons why I dont like to use hints in SQL queries. Today I wanted to follow up to share one situation where I think hints are OK, even necessary. As described very well in an article in an article by Andrew Kelly […]

Five Leading Causes of Oracle Database Performance Problems

As we evaluate our clients’ Oracle databases and help them solve problems relating to performance and stability, we see many causes for these issues. However, there are a small number of basic issues that tend to cause problems on the majority of systems. Our Tech Tips document describes these issues and discusses methods of identifying them and resolving […]

Oracle Performance Tuning — Trust but Verify

During an Oracle Performance Tuning engagement in the past, I learned a valuable lesson about validating the information that you are given during a database evaluation. About ten years ago, a client called me with a serious problem. They had just completed development on a new Oracle application at a large pharmaceutical company and the […]

Oracle Performance Tuning: Periodically reorganize database objects

One of our Oracle Consultants shared a story with me today that illustrates the importance of periodically reorganizing objects in an oracle database. He was examining a performance problem with a very small oracle table. The table had only 154 rows!. Hardly a large table, and yet it was taking over a minute to do […]

Oracle Performance Tuning — Log Sync Waits

I recently worked with a client to resolve a significant performance issue related to painfully slow queries in an Oracle database. One of the queries that they wished to execute was taking over five hours to run. This is an Oracle 10g database running on a Solaris platform. The server has 8 processors so there […]

Five reasons why I avoid database query hints

I know that some will disagree with me on this but I have never been a fan of query hints.

Most database vendors give you the ability to override the query optimizer with hints that you specify in a query. Each query can be executed in a variety of ways by the…