Monday, December 02, 2019

Practical Application Performance Tuning: An nVision Case Study

I gave this presentation at the UKOUG Techfest 19 conference.  It is closely based on a previous presentation about PeopleSoft nVision performance tuning, and uses the experience of a PeopleSoft project as a case study, so I am also posting both here on my PeopleSoft blog, and also on my Oracle blog.
This video was produced as a part of the preparation for this session.  The slide deck is also available on my website.

Learning about and understanding the principles and mechanics of the Oracle database is fundamentally important for both DBAs and developers. It is one of the reasons we still physical conferences.
This presentation tells the story of a performance tuning project for the GL reporting on a Financials system on an engineered system. It required various techniques and features to be brought to bear. Having a theoretical understanding of how the database and various features work allowed us to make reasonable predictions about whether they would be effective in our environment. Some ideas were discounted, some were taken forward.
We will look at instrumentation, ASH, statistics collection, partitioning, hybrid columnar compression, Bloom filtering, SQL profiles. All of them played a part in the solution, some added further complications that had to be worked around, some had to be carefully integrated with the application, and some required some reconfiguration of the application into order to work properly.
Ultimately, performance improvement is an experimental science, and it requires a similar rigorous thought process.