A Discussion on a mailing list prompted this blog

A site has acquired a new storage system aka a new SAN and Oracle as to be given a home on this storage. The DBA wanted to test out the SAN and see if they could get some performance data prior to moving the DW to the new storage. Orion was mentioned as a great testing tool and one DBA mentioned that he had used Orion and it had shown great performance so the decision was made to move.

A query though still didn’t perform that well. After some work it was determined that Parallel Query was very useful for improving the query, (side note he cant use it due to the use of NVARCHAR2)

I guess this points out some not immediately apparent uses of tools like Orion or Jmeter for testing Purposes and Oracle Database 11g Database Replay for solving performance issues.

By the use of Orion it had been established that there was a level of bandwidth across the fabric to the SAN, When a piece of code continued to perform badly there was an opportunity to identify and resolve a work around, without the use of these tools there was no way except the manufacturers benchmarks to assess if the SAN/SAN IO was performing up to scratch. Conversely there is the use of these tools to identify a problem with a SAN that may originally not have been present. Original benchmarks and routine tests can assist to determine whether the SAN performance is degrading over time. This could be due to additional load caused by new servers or new users, changing workloads like additional reporting in a system.

Knowing how to measure this sort of performance and benchmarking this is a very powerful piece of knowledge.

See ya round

Peter