Weblog for the AMIS Technology corner
Posts tagged cary millsap
Review: The Method-R Profiler
Nov 10th
I was lucky enough to get my hands on the Method-R Profiler and had a test drive with it. So first of all what is it? As you might expect a profiler, a profiler for Oracle performance problems. The tool makes use of Oracle’s trace facilities. If you have a performance problem with the database or a specific issue in you code, you are able to set a specific part of your code, or if must be, the whole database in trace mode. The database will write the output of your trace to the UDUMP, user dump, destination or in the trace directory of your database diagnostic section on the database server, depending on your database version.
Consistent Analysis
Pete Finnigan has a nice post about how you can achieve this called “How to set trace for others sessions, for your own session and at instance level“. As also is mentioned in this post, the Oracle TKPROF tool can be used to analyze the generated trace files. One of the disadvantages, IMHO, is that if you give such a TKPROF generated report to, lets say 10 Oracle (DBA) performance interested people, you will get afterwards 10 different analyses regarding what is reported in those reports. This is, among others, also caused by the fact that people most of the time sort the report in different ways. If you are not sure what the cause is for your problem, can’t determine it within context, this might even obfuscate the issue even more.
TKPROF is one of the most known tools used for this task. Of course their are also others like the Oracle Trace Analyzer that might do a better job in your case. As in all cases, while using tooling, use the one who suits you best for the task, but then again, you might not want 10 different opinions about “What’s wrong” or “Might be wrong…?”.
This is where the Method-R Profiler might be of use for you. As the naming references, the profiler is based on the Method-R performance analyzing method. As mentioned on the site of the Method-R main site: “Method R is a fast, effective, commonsense approach to optimizing a system. It was first documented in the book Optimizing Oracle Performance by Method-R founding members Cary Millsap and Jeff Holt.” This book has been, is still, one of the landmarks on the subjects of Oracle performance analysis, and a consistent way, based on response time statistics, to get an answer where your time went or, in case of performance problems, where too much time went, where it shouldn’t…
KSCOPE 2011: What do you mean “Agile”?
Jun 28th
Currently in Cary Millsap’s session about his agile approach on things called “My Case for Agile Methods“. Agile is (not yet) my thing, but knowing Cary, and he is in to it, when he is enthusiastic about something its probably one of those things which you should look into. If not even due to, as far as I know, the Agile context Cary is using is not the Agile context referred to I see being used out there. The “agile” thing out there is the one, is the one, I will joke about. But that said, a lot of methods are not bad at all, but people implement them wrongly so trying to keep an open mind, this session of Cary was more or less mandatory to get my vision about this back on track once more.
Cary also mentioned this emotion that probably mainly goes around in the DBA world. But as Cary mentioned during his presentation, “Agile is not undisciplined”, so if it gets the wrong emotional context, then is mainly due to people not doing it correctly. Could be thats it has to do with not being correctly trained in Agile or maybe incorrectly “managed”. So what is Cary’s feeling about this, that is, “Agile” as is…
Hotsos 2010 – Presenters, Presentations, Presenting
Mar 11th
I never find it very easy to try to capture the atmosphere during a conference, the presenting part, the presentations or the discussions, for example, you could have with the presenters. Hotsos is such a cool and unique event were you have the opportunity, to listen but also to interact. The amount of people that attend isn’t that big, only a few hundreds, but they share all the same passion, the passion to improve on performance, mostly Oracle related. It has only two tracks and its not uncommon that people present and than go afterwards to a presentation to listen in what the other presenter has to say.
Due to the fact that it is manageable in terms of choice, located on a convenient location and well organized, you have the opportunity to pick just the thing you like and most of the time not miss out on “the other” presentation you would have liked to see. Besides that people stay in (overnight in the Hotel), so discussions about the technology, the method or an example during a presentation will be discussed in far more detail than you normally would do, from presenter to presenter or from presenter to the guy that attended and vice versa. The fact that all have the passion for performance or that they realize that performance is a beast with various angles to approach, bounds, and every point, every question is one to be heard and/or discussed. On equal terms. If you have seen my video impressions of Hotsos in 2009, you get a bit of what I am trying to say.
Anyway, not being a native speaker and with my new “flip” at hand (Ultra HD), I just show you how much fun and interesting stuff is going on, probably this will do more right to those presentations than me trying to explain what all those new ideas which were that popped into my head during this years Hotsos Symposium…although…sometimes technology helps and sometimes it just doesn’t…or is it a VMware thing Doug…?
My agenda is not that much different then the one from Doug. The moment it is mentioning RAC related stuff, then I probably would have been attending the other guy.
The Monday started great with a small introduction of Tom Kyte’s generally unknown other qualities…
…Enjoy…
