Adaptive Consulting - Exploring all paths to reach the peak in your business

Between April and June every year, I talk to many organisation and department heads who mention the dreaded “B” word - Budgets. There are many reasons as to why people hate doing budgets, but I'll skip that and tell you how you can make the most out of the budgeting exercise from an Information Technology (IT) management perspective.

There are many aspects of an organisation that are factored into a budget and one area that usually suffers due to lack of vision and forward thinking is Information Technology. Quite often IT Managers (along with many others) use the simple process of adding a percentage to the current year's budget and submit it to the Accountants. Job done and the pain goes away for another year.

That is of course until something happens to that 10 year old server that's been running trouble free, which runs an application that only one person can support but no one has the source code for, suddenly dies. By the time this problem is rectified, it could potentially have taken a huge chunk of money out of your budget that the IT Department cannot invest in any new technology for the rest of the year, until more is allocated in the next budget. Guess what happens the following year? Another unplanned expenese and the story repeats itself...

Part 1 of Database Performance Improvements looked at how to identify the symptoms for poor database performance and what to look for in order to troubleshoot these problems. This part looks at each item in detail and provides some suggestions for resolving these issues.

Suggestions for Improving Performance

1. A database server should never be overloaded. I have seen database servers that are used as email servers and file servers in addition to hosting the database. These processor and memory intensive applications take away resources from the database and could be playing a large part in your performance issues. I would suggest that all non-database applications be moved off the database server, in a planned manner of course.

2. Every system has it's peaks and troughs in terms of usage. At it's peak, there would be many users in the system doing a variety of functions - this is when the performance of the database is crucial. I have seen ERP implementations where production planners run the Master Production Scheduling (MPS) and Material Requirements Planning (MRP) modules several times a day. For those not familiar, the MPS and MRP can be very resource intense modules as they work with large datasets and churn through CPU like there is no tomorrow. For most organisations, these modules can be run once a day, either at day-start or day-end. Multiple runs through the day will not only be overkill, but also affect all other users of the system.

Over the past 15 years or so I have been called upon to investigate and improve database performance issues as well to reconcile databases to ensure data integrity. Whilst most of my experience has been with IBM DB2 and Microsoft SQL Server databases I have found my experience equally transferable across to Oracle and MS Access databases as well.

In this and the following article, I will be sharing some of my expertise on identifying and fixing database performance issues. While the suggestions for database performance improvements are not exhaustive, most business or their Database Administrators should find a few useful tips that will help them in resolving some of the common problems.

Identifying Performance Bottlenecks

The following is a typical scenario that many businesses face:

Did you know that over the Christmas & New Year break, Adaptive Consulting moved?

We have found a new home at 49-51 Rosslyn St, West Melbourne and are very happy to share our office with a host of other wonderful businesses and individuals at the Roslin Business Community. Thanks for welcoming us onboard guys!

As I was reading the article titled "Head in the cloud" on the CIO website, I couldn't help but think we are indeed heading towards a future where IT is becoming a commodity as Cloud Computing services increase.

The example of power generation in the late 19th and early 20th century, described in the article, does ring true in some areas of IT today. How long will it take before we get to a point where businesses are comfortable in buying IT products and services without having to actually own any of the infrastructure and/or resources?