Pythian Group

More than a month has passed since Sydney Oracle Meetup #2. We shot some video, but it took me a while to process it and publish a few interesting pieces, but I finally got it all.

Ric Van Dyke‘s presentation on tuning SQL queries using 10046 trace is available on the SOM website in the Files section (you must be a member). However, there were no material from Tanel Poder‘s session — it’s title started with “Zero Slides…” and Tanel demonstrated live some of his secrets of productivity in Oracle troubleshooting. Luckily, my colleague, Andrey Goryunov, managed to shoot some of it on the video and I’m publishing here a couple fragments on the visualization of Oracle performance troubleshooting.

Make sure you are watching them in HQ on YouTube to see more details and if you like these videos, make sure you rate them.

PerfSheet is a very handy solution based on Microsoft Excel scripting and let you automate extraction and charting of any data you can extract from an Oracle database (and generally speaking, any other database). The best thing is that Tanel has put great efforts in it and made it available to everyone for free. One demo is worth many words so here we go:
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Pythian DBA’s have daily reports for each monitored database and some of the components are using charts to visualize the data. I’m a big fan of charts myself (when applied appropriately) and want to show how you can generate simple charts directly from the database. You’d be very surprised how easy it can be done from *any* database without installing any additional software or configuring something special.

This method is not limited to Oracle by any means — use it with MySQL, SQL Server or any other database as well as without a database — yes, visualize your sar data now!

In this example, we will plot a pie diagram with Oracle tablespaces. This would be very handy when you are starting to analyze the space allocation for a database. Here is the end result of the report for my Grid Control repository test database:

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