Hello everyone,

Just to remind you that our next meeting is planned for the following Wednesday (the most popular day for our meetings according to last survey).

If you are serious about the performance tuning you this is topic exactly for you.

Basically the discussion is about calibration of your new/existing server and comparing it's theoretical power with vendor's declared specification and other (old, new, other vendor, other client etc) servers/storage power.

In the same way a raising team just before starting to work on driver's skills, tests a racing car on an empty track just to make sure that it theoretically possible to compete with other teams and reach demanded performance.

As soon as you made sure that your server could provide necessary CPU/Memory/IO power you can switch to your SQL tuning. Otherwise you may end up spending many hours working on your SQLs' execution planes and didn't succeed as your HW doesn't provide the necessary processing power.

During our Wednesday's meeting we:
-- Will make an overview of the HW performance testing tools that allows to compare power of Oracle based system independent on an application you are running
-- We will start from simplest tools discussing their limitations and switch to more complex once
-- If we are lucky (and I am sure we will be unless Casey has emergency) Casey Dyke who has a proven experience in this area working as a DBA's teams lead in such organisations as Telstra and others telecommunications organisations will share his experience in this area.
-- If we will have enough time I will demonstrate how to calibrate your IO subsystem using ORION (Oracle I/O Calibration Tool). We will test different disk regions and confirm or deny the fact that outermost (hot) tracks of a disk are significantly faster. The most important the will get exact number how faster those are.

So join us and enjoy beer, pizza and the friendly discussion on an interesting technical topics!

Best regards,
Yury & Co

Also to supplement last nights discussion on disk region performance, the following white paper looks at the advantages and better performance of using higher speed drives instead of just using the outer diameter if the disk (ie short-stroking):
http://www.seagate.co...
cheers,
Paul