Health Check/Tuning

Oracle database environments can be very complex.  Frequent checks of overall database help improve performance, reduce down time and help plan properly for the short term and long term goals. We can offer fixed price Oracle Health Check services that can provide you with a detailed overview of the state of your Oracle environments. 

At a high level, here are broad areas to perform health check

• OS Level - patches, kernel parameters, optimization
• I/O Analysis - Understand how your database is distributed across hard drives and impacting the performance.
• Network traffic analysis - Check for Network bottlenecks
• Backup and Recovery Strategy - Check if the backup strategy is still good with availability goals of the business. Plan for frequent restore tests.
• Security - Check for recent security patches and updates
• Logs, traces, Cores - Check for back ground processes errors before they become major problems.
• Performance check - A quick check of log switches to understand peak hours (writes) and top SQL's to understand most impacting SQL's, Hit ratios, fragmentations, Waits, contentions, Table scans, etc.
• Oracle parameters - check if those settings still make sense
• Advanced Configuration - check RAC, Replication, Standby Database
• Check Oracle performance indicators using performance stats reports.

Here are some recent examples of our Tuning Work:

• Our client's update report was taking in excess of 20 hours to run on a HP UX system with Oracle 10.2.0.3. The application Health Check showed AWR report that a single query within the report was making millions of I/O requests. By adding a new index the query reduced report execution time from 20 hours to 18 seconds.
• Client’s SAP BW/Oracle report used to take days to finish. We identified that the index on a driving table was a candidate for rebuilding. Since we couldn’t take users offline from system, we used Quest rebuilding tool to build index online with absolutely no downtime. An index rebuild dropped report time from days to 30 mins.
• Client system was running fine but suddenly a piece of SQL which used to take seconds to finish started consuming more than an hour. A good technical analysis indicated SQL was using different path as a result of database statistics with no histograms. We enabled database stats using DBMS_STATS and added right histograms on system which dropped SQL execution time back to seconds.

For a free assessment of how Oracle Tuning can help your organisation please contact us