Boost Oracle Performance with a Comprehensive Health Check

Your physical performance is not up to par and you’re feeling a little sluggish. So what do you do?

If you’re like most, you’ll probably schedule an appointment with your doctor to find out what the problem might be, and how to quickly get back up to speed. So if your Oracle database doesn’t seem to be performing as expected, doesn’t it make sense to schedule a health check to see how you can boost it up a notch or two?

Every system needs a checkup from time to time, and your Oracle database is no exception. A periodic health check can keep it optimized and running smoothly, and help you avoid more serious issues from developing later.

And just as there isn’t a magic pill to get you feeling better again, there isn’t one to keep your database in peak form either. Rather, it takes a proactive, comprehensive health check that seeks to understand your environment, analyze its current state, and offer improvements.

Discover

Interview key business and technical stakeholders to thoroughly understand the environment, including:

• Vision, mission, goals and objectives, as well as challenges and pains.
• Current transaction volumes, services levels, and business growth trends.
• Internal and external drivers that influence the data architecture.
• Data management trends.
• Infrastructure standards for hardware, storage, and backups.
• Application-certified standards for government rules and regulations (eg, HIPAA, PCI, etc.).
• Operational management standards and service levels.
• Development and product release management.
• Vendor products and overall IT strategy.
• Industry-based thought leadership with reference architecture solutions for the business.

Analyze

Review the current state of all architecture components, including:

• Host operating system, configuration parameters, CPU, and memory usage.
• Storage deployment strategy, including Tier 1 storage, Tier 2 storage, Oracle ASM, data ILM archiving, etc.
• Network traffic for private and public data.
• Oracle database configuration options.
• Oracle performance metrics and wait state via AWR reports.
• Oracle application access and concurrency, JDBC/ODBC/ODAC/SQL*Net, session management, object management, schema management, etc.
• Oracle options, such as RAC, Partitioning, Streams, and Active Data Guard.
• Oracle monitoring tools, such as OEM, alerts and standard operating procedures.
• Operation metrics for system components, including host CPU, memory, SAN disk IO utilization, and network utilization.
• Operation metrics for growth and capacity trends.
• Backup and recovery policy and procedures.

This holistic analysis should produce a scorecard, similar to the example below. Each criteria is measured against best practices and optimal usage to quickly show what’s keeping your system from optimal operation.

Optimize

With a solid understanding of your environment and metrics highlighting areas of concern, a solution roadmap and architecture blueprint can be developed to help ensure that your system:

• Has ample CAP (capacity, availability, performance) to efficiently support your workloads.
• Is accurately configured to support your requirements.
• Provides critical data protection and system security.

Prevention is always better than the cure, so proactively performing regularly scheduled health checks can keep your database healthy and robust—and keep you from spending unneeded time maintaining sluggish systems and risking SLAs. Have you scheduled your health check to better understand your Oracle Performance?

How much time does it take to optimize your system…and is that the best use of your time? MiCORE specializes in optimizing Oracle database systems and can start by providing a free health check for your system…and give you back some of your time.