Weblog for the AMIS Technology corner
Posts tagged method-r
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…
Bloom Filters, Hierarchical Profiling, Synopses & One pass distinct sampling, jumping the GAPP … – feast for DBAs (considered harmful..)
May 18th
It’s Monday night and a select company of DBAs and Database developers have gathered at AMIS HQ in Nieuwegein for the ‘Looking Back at Hotsos 2009′ session. It is one of those sessions that has a lot of energy, laughter and a wealth of serious content. Four very experienced speakers relate their best experiences and most important learning points from the Hotsos conference. And the audience is allowed to participate. Speakers are Marco Gralike, Toon Koppelaars, Gerwin Hendriksen and Jeroen Evers.
The evening brings us – apart from a quite good dinner – interesting topics such as Bloom Filters, Hierarchical Profiling,..
(note: the text in the title between parentheses are for insiders only)
