What Do You Mean By Database Performance?

What Do You Mean By Database Performance?

Ensuring optimal performance is one of the most important goals of IT professionals. And for DBAs, tuning and monitoring are often daily tasks. But there are many factors involved in properly optimizing, monitoring, and tuning databases and the applications that access them—too many to do the topic justice in a single column. Nevertheless, we can address the basics!

Even in today’s modern IT environment, performance management is often conducted reactively instead of proactively. You know the drill. A client calls with a response time problem. A table space maxes out on extents. A program is running without taking commits causing all kinds of locking problems. Somebody changed an application package without checking on the new access paths and transactions are slower than before. And then somebody submitted that “query from hell” again that just won’t stop running. Sound familiar? All too often DBAs are being asked to respond reactively to problems that could have been prevented, if only we implemented more proactive performance management steps. So, we must routinely and reactively put out the performance fires.

Yet management and consultants continue to promote the benefits of proactive management. And, of course, they are correct. Being proactive can reduce, or even eliminate many of the problems that DBAs deal with on a daily basis.

Many of the supposedly proactive steps taken against completed applications in production are mostly reactive. DBAs are often too busy taking care of day-to-day tactical tasks to be able to proactively monitor and tune their systems like …

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