Catchy title – huh? But don’t laugh, in today’s hectic world many database professionals (whether DBA’s or developers – and sometimes even end users) just wish that the Oracle database would go faster. That may seem self evident – but let’s just accept that premise for now. So what does this mean for Toad users?

 

Toad offers numerous database monitoring, diagnostic and tuning screens or utilities. But not all of us have sufficient spare time to dig through the database haystack to find such issues. Moreover we all don’t know the database internals anymore – because Oracle 10g and 11g have become such technical behemoths. For example, just how many of us now know all the various wait events and what they really, really mean anymore? There are just too many to stay an expert on every little internal detail.

 

So what’s an Oracle professional to do? How should we attack a performance problem where we know that the SLA is being missed – but there are a lot of things going on that we may or may not know all the details about. And like the database, applications have become very complex too – often with numerous technology layers beyond the database. So how can we quickly and easily locate the needle in the haystack? Because we all want to concentrate on fixing items that quickly yield measurable results.

 

For those who have licensed Oracle’s diagnostic and tuning packs – Toad offers screens to support more productive work with those facilities. Because not everyone wants or is permitted to run OEM – as some shops limit OEM access to production DBA’s. That’s OK as Toad with the DB Administrators module (or bundle) can help you out here.

 

My experience has been that the fastest way to locate and concentrate on the most likely database performance issues is via Oracle’s AWR and ADDM reports. For those who do not have those Oracle options (they are optional OEM add-on licenses) – you can very often use the Stats Pack report in a similar fashion. Simply take a manual AWR and/or Stats Pack snapshot before and after some time period where database performance is generally not acceptable. Then run the reports using Toad’s screens (rather than OEM).

 

Here are examples of the AWR and ADDM screen’s that I’m talking about – and the tabs (i.e. reports) of key interest. Often just these two reports alone can point me into the right direction for where to spend my tuning time and effort.

 

 

 

By starting with an analysis of just these two reports, I can often locate the most critical areas of concern and thus promptly address the most major performance issues – and all within just a few minutes time. What I’m saying is that for 20% of my diagnostic time and effort, I can locate and often correct 80% of my biggest issues.

 

Then from here, I can now dive into the other more complex or detailed Toad screens or utilities for performance optimization – such as the Database Health Check (part of Toad Database Admin Module) and/or the SQL Optimizer (part of Toad Xpert Edition).

 

Thus I can use Toad to quickly solve some major issues (so as to quiet things down a bit so I can look further). Then I can use the many other Toad features to find the remaining and more complex performance issues that need attention. So Toad permits me to do the heavy lifting very fast, and then to follow-up with the more intricate work to its logical conclusion. In other words, Toad can do for database performance what it has always done for SQL and PL/SQL development – improve your productivity by letting you concentrate on the task at hand rather than the Oracle mechanisms to do it.

 

You gotta love Toad J

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