Oracle Query Performance Tuning

DPA’s agentless architecture is built to help database administrators perform Oracle DB performance monitoring in any environment without straining network resources. This structure is designed to be incredibly lightweight, using less than one percent of load even during busy Oracle DB monitoring periods.

DPA can monitor Oracle databases such as Standard Edition, and Enterprise Edition deployed on-premises, in the cloud, and in virtual environments. Providing insight into the entire environment is critical, alongside Oracle databases it also has support for Oracle RAC, ASM, E-Business Suite, and Exadata.

The tool can also group pluggable databases into a container database for faster Oracle DB monitoring in a multi-tenant environment.

Data is only useful if you can make sense of it. DPA wants to help you get to the bottom of performance issues quickly and easily. It comes with comprehensive alerting and reporting designed to keep you updated whenever a metric reaches or crosses critical thresholds and needs your attention. The intuitive interface can make it easier for you to see data from a distance and then dive into the key metrics. DPA also helps keep teams on the same page with reports capable of being customized to inform a wide range of stakeholders from DBAs to engineers, so you share the same performance story.

When it comes to Oracle database performance monitoring, the process itself is much like the process of monitoring other relational database management systems. Monitoring Oracle involves measuring key metrics that can influence database performance to help maximize Oracle database uptime, keep IT productivity up, and deliver database queries quickly.

The overall purpose of database monitoring, no matter the type of database, is to keep the database itself and your associated resources functioning at the highest level possible. Only then can you ensure your application infrastructure is functional and available to end users.

For example, many key metrics involved in effective Oracle database monitoring are related to query performance. Queries play a critically important role in Oracle database performance monitoring, since they’re the center of database function and performance.

Thorough database monitoring in Oracle should also look at both your software and hardware. As you collect performance data over time, you can better determine baselines for various metrics and identify deviations from the norm that could indicate a problem. With these baseline records, database monitoring can also make it easier to spot exactly where the problem first arose, so you can target root cause in your troubleshooting efforts.

Effective Oracle database monitoring can make it easier for IT administrators and database administrators to conduct faster and more accurate problem resolution processes, which can save organizations time and resources. By quickly detecting and analyzing abnormally slow queries, DPA can also help you meet and improve related application performance SLOs and end-user experience. Whether your end users are employees or customers, a better experience can have significant benefits for your organization.

No matter the size of your organization, database monitoring for Oracle is a major endeavor and requires the use of a tool if you want to fully reap the benefits of monitoring efforts. Unlike manual monitoring efforts, Oracle database performance monitoring tools can track performance metrics 24/7, alerting you when your attention is needed and giving you the information you need to remediate issues.

Successful Oracle database performance analysis tooling depends on identifying which metrics are most important for understanding performance and how to make sense of them. While queries and monitoring throughput are often considered common Oracle performance metrics, other Oracle database performance metrics can go even deeper into the system and may also be important to track.

Some essential Oracle database performance metrics you should consider monitoring include:

Under-allocated RAM: Sometimes increasing your RAM (instead of using the much-slower disk access) can increase your database speed. When you don’t have enough RAM allocated to shared_pool_size, db_cache_size, and Aggregate_target, your database will be forced to operate at the speed of physical I/O. Keeping an eye on these metrics can help ensure this doesn’t happen.

Rows Read/Row Selected Ratio: This ratio tells you how many rows within your database had to be read before there was a return for your specified rows. If the ratio is higher than 20, you may have an issue with your database indexes. Monitoring this metric can save you hours of research in searching for the reasons for a slow database.

Transaction Log Response Time: Your log response times can impact latency during transactions. This can become a significant problem—especially when it comes to critical transactions. By identifying and addressing slow log response times, you can improve your latency issues.

Page Cleaning Ratio: The page cleaning metric has become an increasingly important metric, especially for e-commerce pages and online publishers. This ratio gives you insight into your page cleaners, which write your old pages to the disk asynchronously, allowing your new pages to be read into the buffer pool.

In Memory Sort Ratio: When your database is having issues with speed, this ratio can be an important piece of the puzzle in determining the root cause. The In Memory Sort Ratio tells you how many sorts are being handled on the disk as opposed to in memory. Sorts handled in the tablespace are significantly slower than those in RAM, so if you see more sorts occurring in disk, it may be the reason for your slow speeds.

Excessive nested loop joins: The unfortunate reality is that iterative loop joins are going to be slow. The best thing you can do is dig into the code to try to find better options than nested loop joins wherever possible.

An Oracle performance analyzer can help database administrators more easily maintain a high level of service by helping them ensure databases are functioning properly.

Enterprises of all sizes rely on databases to keep their large datasets organized, particularly the datasets called upon again and again each time a customer requests information. It’s important to remember databases aren’t static reservoirs of information, they’re more like active repositories that need to be periodically refined and retooled to achieve maximum performance. If databases don’t perform at their fullest potential, service can slow down and customers may take their business elsewhere.

An Oracle performance analyzer can help prevent this by making it easier to optimize database and query performance. Without this tool, performance tuning can devolve into a guessing game. If I change this table, how will it change my database’s overall performance? How is response-time being affected? Where exactly is the bottleneck? Without an Oracle performance analyzer, trying to answer these questions can involve going through a large amount of data, manually adjusting indexes and queries, and waiting to see how they affect performance.

Oracle performance analyzers help take the guesswork out of Oracle SE database and query performance analysis. These tools offer comprehensive database performance monitoring, help you more easily pinpoint issues caused by inefficient queries, and can give you the necessary tools to quickly and effectively troubleshoot.

Having an Oracle performance analyzer is also important if you move from Oracle Enterprise Edition (EE) to Oracle Standard Edition (SE), as an Oracle performance analyzer can help provider high-fidelity Oracle SE performance monitoring without reliance on OEM Diagnostic Pack provided by Oracle EE.

SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer is a comprehensive Oracle monitoring tool designed to help database administrators manage, streamline, and optimize Oracle database performance.

DPA can help ensure optimum database performance for a broad spectrum of Oracle products, including Oracle SE, EE, RAC, Exadata, E-Business, and PDBs. DPA is built to help you eliminate bottlenecks, improve quality of service for end users, and can even help reduce the overall cost of using Oracle products in your systems environment through optimization.

DPA’s extensive analysis capabilities are designed to break down Oracle database performance, enhancing Oracle DB monitoring insights by helping you better understand key areas like SQL wait times, blocking data, resource metrics, and more. This 24/7 monitoring solution can also allow you to dig into root causes during a slowdown or look into historical data when everything is running smoothly to help improve overall Oracle DB performance.

DPA’s custom alerts can also help notify you of potential performance issues before they become full-blown slowdowns with the ability to customize alerts to ensure you filter out the alerting noise and are notified of issues at the exact moment you need to be.

If an issue does occur, intelligent machine-learning algorithms and table tuning advisors included in DPA can help you refine your Oracle database performance monitoring and tuning best practices. SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer is designed to provide database administrators what they need to ensure Oracle databases are operating at their highest capacity and potential.