Improve Database Performance Tool

The objective of a database performance tool is to establish a well-performing database and minimize bottlenecks. Efficient databases can improve the end-user experience and ultimately save your business money.

A multitude of potential issues within your server or database can lead to bottlenecks slowing performance. To improve database server performance, a database performance tool can help you better understand your database and support a time-sensitive approach to database performance enhancement.

Improving database performance using a database performance tool begins with collecting detailed metrics from your database and underlying server components to make diagnosing bottlenecks easier.

A comprehensive database performance tool can provide real-time analytics alongside historical trends to help you better understand the specific queries that may be leading to anomalous performance and slow retrieval from your database. By providing rapid alerts for performance issues and automating many of the processes involved in root-cause analysis, an effective database performance tool can also help you resolve performance issues quicker.

Issue detection is crucial, but it’s often just the first step in successfully improving your database performance. Once the database performance tool has helped you identify the root cause of the queries or tables leading to slow performance, you need to solve performance issues with accurate and efficient troubleshooting. To assist with troubleshooting, database performance tools can offer tuning recommendations, resource allocation summaries, and other helpful reports to cut down your troubleshooting time.

SolarWinds DPA is a database performance tool designed with machine-learning features that improve over time to better predict database behavior patterns. With real-time issue detection for bottlenecks, DPA can provide automated summary reports to analyze trends, so you more quickly deploy an evidence-based solution to improve database performance.

Before using a database monitoring tool, it’s important to understand how a database performance tool can help improve performance and create a faster database.

While there’s not just one database optimization approach, the most effective database performance tools tend to execute two distinct tasks: helping you quickly identify bottlenecks and more easily troubleshoot solutions.

To identify database performance issues in real time, database performance tools can provide insight into a range of metrics to help you determine root cause of bottlenecks. The source of these performance metrics can vary—traditional database tools often use resource metrics, while more modern tools may also leverage insights from end-user wait times.

Database performance tools are designed to help you pinpoint issues that can arise from inefficient operations within your database, whether it’s caused by a mistake in the SQL code itself or in the indexing of the query.

To improve overall database performance, it’s also important to monitor performance issues within the server itself, including basic infrastructure metrics like CPU utilization, network performance, and memory. Your database performance tool should offer a holistic view of your database server.

To help with troubleshooting, database performance tools use trends to help you determine effective solutions to performance issues. Having these best practices recommendations can help guide you in correcting bottlenecks in less time than manually troubleshooting.

SolarWinds DPA is designed as a multi-dimensional database performance tool, with an emphasis on helping speed up bottleneck identification and resolving issues with automated advisors to improve overall database performance. With DPA, you can more quickly identify when and where bottlenecks occur and what you need to do to fix them.

A high-functioning database with minimal inefficiencies is the hallmark of a trustworthy, profitable business. With database monitoring tools, you can improve your database performance for a faster, more efficient user experience.

Improving database performance can help save time and money in the long run by supporting:

• Higher database efficiency. Data retrieval can be slowed down by a number of factors, such as poorly written queries, server infrastructure issues, or indexing issues. With each of these performance issues, a resulting bottleneck can slow down performance and lower productivity. Optimizing database performance offers businesses the ability to minimize financial loss caused by server inefficiencies.
• Improving end-user experience. A good customer experience is necessary to strengthen your brand, maintain happy clientele, and avoid losing customers. Customer-facing applications and websites may rely on the database performance, which determines the impact of user-facing applications. When suboptimal queries or inefficient indexes slow down data retrieval, customers may have a slow and frustrating user experience. Since end-user applications engage directly with your database, database performance can be directly linked to customer satisfaction. As a result, improving database performance can be one of the most important customer service tools in your IT toolbox.

While many traditional database monitoring tools use database health metrics to identify bottlenecks, internal database metrics aren’t always the most accurate indicators of end-user performance. This is why DPA leverages response time analysis, also referred to as wait time analysis, to help improve database performance and more easily identify the issues IT teams should focus on to better align with service level delivery efforts.

Once you identify long wait times or anomalies, DPA can help you more easily drill down into queries, indexes, and tables to assist with troubleshooting. Using the built-in tuning advisors, you can view user-friendly icons with detailed information about inefficient queries to help guide the troubleshooting process. In addition to query advisors, DPA provides table tuning advisors, which can offer detailed insights into inefficient tables.

To get a complete picture of your database health, DPA uses real-time, multidimensional data analysis and historical trends to help identify the best opportunities for database performance improvement by highlighting what trends and anomalies would benefit the most from SQL tuning. From five years ago to five seconds ago, Database Performance Analyzer provides a wide range of historical data to help you find and resolve performance problems.

All too often, businesses expand their on-premises tech infrastructure because they don’t understand the source of their bottlenecks. Bottlenecks may appear to be the result of a hardware performance issue, like low disk space, which would require expensive new hardware to fix. However, many performance issues that appear resource-based are actually due to slow queries. As a result, businesses commonly invest in new hardware to improve performance when the real problem lies in the database.

SolarWinds DPA can help businesses avoid unnecessary purchases with easy-to-understand resource allocation analysis. By understanding the relationship between your on-premises resources and database performance, you can make more informed decisions to purchase hardware only when necessary. In addition to on-premises infrastructure, using DPA to better understand resource allocation with virtual servers, like your VMware infrastructure, can also help you determine whether bottlenecks are a result of resource constraints or database performance issues. With DPA, your business can benefit from a database management software built to help align resource provisioning with improved database performance.