Oracle Database Performance Tuning Services

Arc DBA Consulting conducts Oracle database performance assessments and tuning for organizations and on behalf of partners built on many years of experience in the field putting in-depth knowledge of best practices and standards to practical use. DBA experts have developed short-hand methods of reviewing your database environment to improve system performance, which also necessarily involves improving database availability, stability, and scalability. Our DBAs are enterprise architects with experience in troubleshooting performance problems across all infrastructure tiers, not just the database. This ability to analyze end-to-end system performance allows us to quickly diagnose whether a performance problem is in the database or perhaps another technology stack component. A fair number of customers have brought us in for performance issues that were thought to reside in the database. But whenever possible, we begin with a cursory analysis of the entire system so that we can pinpoint the root causes of the most serious performance issues, wherever they may lie. We can then focus our tuning on the top offenders, which may or may not include the database layer. For non-database performance issues, if requested by the customer’s IT team, we can call on one of our specialized infrastructure administrators to assist in addressing the problem, whether with the operating system, virtualization, network, or storage configuration.

If the database or applications SQL needs to be tuned, our DBAs will then use the latest top-down, wait-based methodology employing both automated and manual means. Our consultants will collect diagnostic data and recommend improvements to eliminate performance bottlenecks in order of criticality, and also point out potential issues that could later surface. We will present our findings and recommendations to key stakeholders in a timely manner, document them in an engagement summary, and if the customer desires, help implement our recommendations.

The methodology we use encompasses the following areas of database performance, at a minimum:

• Database server configuration, including database/OS configuration files and hardware/software certification (database, OS and third-party products, versions, patch levels and bugs)
• Capacity and scalability assessment
• Database initialization parameters
• Database workload during peak and off-peak times due to batch and OLTP processing
• Automated jobs within SQL Tuning Advisor, SQL Access Advisor, and for gathering database and system statistics
• Hardware resource utilization (e.g., CPU, RAM, I/O, and network throughput/latency)
• High availability and disaster recovery setup
• Backup methodology and schedules