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Why Is Performance Tuning Important?

Just like optimizing your business performance is essential, making your journey easy and enjoyable while traveling to any place is also important. Install Atoto a6 now in your car to get the best navigation help and entertainment options. However, the article below will educate you all about performance tuning. Read along to get the best knowledge about how database administrators can help you optimize your data and help your business perform better.

As a database administrator, one of my main responsibilities is to ensure databases run as efficiently as possible. In most cases, this refers to tuning SQL Server queries or Oracle queries to improve their performance. Tuning database performance is all about reconfiguring the operating systems to support system function and better end-user experience, including deploying clusters and optimizing database performance. 

SQL performance tuning uses historical data to establish a performance baseline. You should have baseline data that includes:

  • Transaction volumes and response times (application statistics)
  • Statistical information about the database
  • Statistics for operating systems
  • Statistics about disk access
  • Statistics about networks

After creating a baseline, a database administrator can track all queries, indexes, and tables and optimize the database’s performance. Database administrators can create monitoring plans to prevent future performance problems once the issues have been identified and resolved.

Tuning a database’s performance necessary?

Enhancing the performance of your databases is just one step toward keeping your applications running smoothly. Database tuning is intended to simplify the process of retrieving information from your data. If you don’t tune your database, you might run into problems when running queries, such as incorrect results or slow queries.

The performance of a database is usually tuned after complaints of slow queries or applications are made by database administrators. 

The business performance of a company begins to suffer when user satisfaction declines. Various factors can affect database performance, including:

  • Input/output delays
  • A poorly configured disk or significant amounts of unnecessary hardware can lead to this problem
  • Those disk I/Os were caused by poorly tuned SQL.
  • Contention surrounding latches
  • In most cases, application changes can resolve contention.
  • Excessive CPU utilization
  • Untuned SQL statements, inadequately sized systems, and inefficient application programs may lead to this problem.

A dedicated administrator is essential for correcting and monitoring the problems once they are detected.

Practices for improving the performance of databases

 

Most commonly, SQL Server and Oracle databases use different performance tuning practices. Database administrators need to be aware of a few basic tasks they should complete during performance tuning.

SQL Server:

  • Wait for statistics for a specific user
  • Finding long-running queries that might require tuning using an execution plan cache or query store
  • Out-of-date statistics, missing indexes, or fragmented indexes
  • (Memory, parallelism, and file handling) SQL Server parameters
  • Setup and configuration of the operating system (layout, formats, drivers)
  • A sufficient allocation of memory and CPU
  • Executions of scheduled jobs and user activity
  • Throughput of transactions
  • Database design and code

Oracle:

  • Statistics pack and AWR reports
  • Tunable weight reports include bottlenecks and top weight reports
  • SQL optimization in AWR since long-running
  • Configuration of the storage device
  • A setting for setting the RAM in SGA and PGA
  • Configuration/consumption of memory
  • There are various units for configuration
  • A summary of disk IO statistics
  • Throughout the entire transaction

There are several other specific methods to ensure your database is performing optimally during performance tuning. This is just a summary of what to look for.

The execution plan for SQL Server

Using an SQL Server Execution Plan, a database administrator can track the execution of a query to identify where an issue may be occurring. Execution Plans in SQL Server illustrate the data retrieval method used by the query optimizer by graphically displaying the query results. Following are the steps for viewing the execution plan in SQL Server:

  • By entering Ctrl + M or Ctrl + L, you can preview the full Execution Plan after running a query
  • Select the “Display Actual Execution Plan” option by right-clicking the query window

Once that has been done, the database administrator can use either option to interpret and save the Execution Plan for the select queries.

Oracle Data Protection Analyzer (DPA) by Solar Winds:

Database administrators, developers, and managers can monitor databases on-premises and in the cloud with a data performance analyzer. With DPA, Solar Winds provides detailed metrics about CPU, memory, disk, network, and more. There are tools to identify performance bottlenecks, response time analysis, and database monitoring included in the software. An administrator can correlate database activity, wait times, SQL statements, application requests, among other facets, to pinpoint the specific cause for database slowdowns.

The fine-tuning of the query

Performance tuning of databases is primarily geared toward improving query execution. A production database should be optimized to keep impacting database performance as minimally as possible. Performance can get slowed if queries aren’t fine-tuned consistently.

You can fine-tune a query in the following ways:

  • Enhance SELECT queries
  • To avoid using unnecessary data in exploratory queries, use SELECT rather than SELECT* (“Select all”).
  • Make sure the indexes are correct
  • Utilize the smallest possible set of data
  • Tables and fields that are unnecessary should be removed
  • Substitute your WHERE and JOIN clauses for calculations.
  • When a phrase ends, use wildcards only
  • It will help if you use wildcards sparingly when searching for plaintext data (e.g., cities or names).
  • Consider running your query at off-peak times.

Caching of result sets for performance optimization:

By enabling a dedicated SQL pool, the results of repetitive queries can be cached automatically. Through result set caching, queries perform better and reduce computer resource usage. Following queries can retrieve results directly from the cached results, so they don’t need to be recomputed.

Dedicated SQL pools manage cache evictions automatically based on a schedule as follows:

  • Invalidate the result set every 48 hours if it hasn’t been used or if it hasn’t been used in the last 48 hours
  • Caching of result sets nears its maximum size

To empty all result set caches manually, users can use one of the following options:

  • For the database, disable cached result sets
  • As long as you’re connected to your database, run DBCC DROPRESULTSETCACHE

You can also contact one of our DBAs if you have any questions related to performance tuning or data optimization for your SQL Server or Oracle database.