If you check out the “Butterfly Effect” on Wikipedia, you’ll find a rather interesting reference to, “sensitive dependence on initial conditions in chaos theory.” Fascinating use of phrase that probably doesn’t mean much to normal people until it happens to you. I could give you lots of theoretical examples, but perhaps a real-life one will make more sense.

Last week, a client of Pythian’s came to us with an environment that had recently been upgraded from Oracle Applications 11.5.9 to 11.5.10. In the past, Pythian has not supported the Oracle Applications environment for this client, but that is one of the strengths of Pythian — we have DBAs with a broad range of knowledge and expertise to support just about anything thrown at us. The emails from the client users suggested a myriad of performance issues, ranging from forms being slow to POs not being processed.

I can sympathize with the client, as I used to be one (that’s how I came to work for Pythian — but it’s also another story that I shall relate sometime). Performance issues in Applications can be tricky at best, as there are so many diverse factors to consider. Not having supported Oracle Apps for this client before means that we were starting with a clean slate and just looking for things out of the ordinary based on experience with other clients, sort of “searching for a needle in a haystack.”

The first thing was to just login to the application and take a quick walk about the area — did anything stand out? What was the first impression? It took a bit of time to get connected initially, but the forms seemed to come up without any undue issues. One of the early comments in the email we had received mentioned that POs weren’t being processed by the workflows. Maybe a trip to “View Requests” was in order . . .

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