Review: Sybase Podcast "Art of Performance & Tuning: General Best Practices"
Summary
This article reviews a podcast released by Sybase on "The Art of Performance & Tuning: General Best Practices".
Introduction
Sybase Inc are releasing a podcast series on best practices and tips in performance and tuning for Adaptive Server Enterprise.
The podcast reviewed here, released in November 2006, is historic in that its the first podcast produced by the company for ASE. Podcasting joins recent innovations by the company to disseminate educational material such as providing recorded webinars (web seminars) and staff blogs.
Podcast Details
This podcast is the first in the series and provides an overview of how to approach P&T (performance and tuning). As Sybase Inc has a habit of moving around its web resources, I'll give the full title here for search purposes: "ASE Tech Talk #001-01: The Art of Performance & Tuning: General Best Practices". The podcast has a running time of 21 minutes. The host is Stefan Karlsson and the guest speaker is Peter Thawley.
The first few minutes are understandably taken up with some housekeeping chores: where to find the podcasts, forums on ISUG, mailing lists etc. These aren't repeated at any length in subsequent podcasts I've heard. I played the opening back to try to get the email address and was caught out by the perfect-but-accented English of the host. I later found all the details on the main resource page at http://www.sybase.com/asetechtalk
What's it all about?
The main content defines four keystones of a structured approach to P&T.
Objectives and Priorities: Stefan and his guest speaker Peter Thawley discuss the importance of understanding and making the right-tradeoffs between throughput and response-time. That's not just the DBA understanding the issues, but making the business understand that a trade-off actually exists between these two aspects of any database system.
Test Environment: Peter Thawley has a favorite phrase "test the system you're running". Both speakers emphasise the importance of stress-testing at a system level as opposed to tuning in isolation.
Testing Rigour: "How do you know its not a temporary phenomenon?" Stefan asks. I smiled ruefully at more than one memory of getting sidetracked into trying to replicate in Test a "slowness" in Production, only to conclude that it was a once-off issue. After musing on the importance of documentation, the pair go on to discuss what I consider the most important advice to the less-experienced DBA: Change One Thing At A Time (my capitals!). Changing cache is used as a good simple example of the pitfalls of ignoring this advice.
Right Tools: Only a brief discussion is given here, as Stefan notes that there will be a later podcast devoted entirely to tools. But again, there's good advice for the inexperienced DBA through the emphasis that the venerable sp_sysmon is the 30,000 foot view that won't find the root cause of the bottlenecks it identifies.
Our Verdict
For the less-experienced DBA, this is an excellent way to spend 20 minutes to get a high level overview of best practices. Is there anything here for the experienced DBA? Certainly.
Podcasts are an opportunity for the speakers to impart their own experiences and opinions alongside the technical information. Otherwise, they may as well put up a powerpoint presentation. Stefan and Peter both bring the personal touch to proceedings. Peter talks briefly about a current tuning project for a telco (wanting 40,000 tps and 10 ms response time with 4 TB of data, nice) before making a point about the importance of the DBA being closely involved in the development cycle. Its these "sidebars" that make listening to a podcast more about keeping in touch with fellow DBAs in the trenches than just a learning opportunity.
In all, our verdict at Five Salmon on this historic first ASE podcast from Sybase is: bring on some more
Submitted: 18 Jan 2007
Author: Margaret Cruise O'Brien, MCOB Technology
(c) M.C.O.B. Technology 2007