tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83133719099334767642011-12-29T20:48:36.140ZSharing real world experiences on database tuning. A place to think about and discuss database performance tuning. Have fun.Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.comBlogger511100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-75222424037709856862011-12-29T20:48:00.001Z2011-12-29T20:48:31.024Z

Unlike other years, where I wrote my "predictions" entry at the end of the year, this time I'm going to try to predict what is going to happen in a few technology areas in 2012. Oh yes, another not so database centric post. Well, it does have some database content. Read on. First, I don't believe in the "the year of...." idea. At least applied to technology, it does not make much sense. There

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-71143175626962347802011-11-16T08:09:00.001Z2011-11-16T13:49:04.090Z

During my first years of Linux, I switched between KDE and GNOME at the same time as I switched distributions, or more exactly, as each distro had a different default desktop environment. Later on, I began switching when each desktop environment leapfrogged others with new fancy functionality. Then, some time ago, I settled on KUbuntu, and keep using it for my day to day desktop users. I'm

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-75777587018352755752011-10-15T23:19:00.000+01:002011-10-15T23:19:49.191+01:00

iOS5 update is here. I applied to my iPad. The process is more or less the following (PC version): - iTunes version update, of course after the update you need to reboot Windows. Why on earth you need to reboot Windows to update iTunes is beyond me. This is a mere 70MB download that installs pretty quickly, and thankfully Windows 7 boots fast. - After the iOS5 release, lots of apps have been

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-40746377939903356252011-09-29T08:27:00.000+01:002011-09-29T09:32:21.073+01:00

(follow up to the VBScript from hell) It was a popular marketing motto for pushing new programming languages a while ago. "BASIC/COBOL/xxxx is great because I (or my boss) can understand it". And you are probably be able to understand it because it is full of global variables, pieces of code that repeat over and over, simple operations that can be resolved with library calls reinvented again

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-91229342934316230342011-09-20T16:34:00.000+01:002011-09-20T16:45:51.358+01:00

I grew up on structured programming. After introducing myself into the wonderful world of programming by ways of old school, line-numbered, GOTO and GOSUB BASIC, peppered with assembly for obvious performance reasons, I started to learn Pascal using Turbo Pascal (thanks, Borland!) and from there jumped to other structured languages (C and its cousins) and to a few non structured ones: hello to

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-50892867039437782032011-09-08T12:42:00.000+01:002011-09-09T00:46:29.790+01:00

(Note before assuming I'm an Apple hater: I own a few Apple devices, none of them a Mac. I've been -and plan to continue using- an iPad for eight months, and recently purchased another one for a family member) With the latest failed attempt of HP to at least establish some presence in the tablet market, and the subsequent hugely successful sale after the price drop, I did a cursory examination

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-39398597624122688002011-06-09T09:21:00.000+01:002011-06-09T09:21:16.839+01:00

And I thought that this discussion was forgotten a long time ago. But yes, at some point in the distant past, I wasted some time reading the different arguments for using an attribute list versus using the wildcard in a SELECT statement. At the time, those discussions about the performance differences did not made sense to me. In the grand scheme of things, the difference was so small at the

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-32946608901373737672011-06-04T22:25:00.000+01:002011-06-04T22:25:37.813+01:00

During the final user validation of a new packaged application, we were getting complaints of bad performance, and the usual suspect, the database, was apparently perfectly well. This is where the SQL Server 2005 trace facilities shine. You can trace what is going on inside the database engine with quite a high level of accuracy, including filtering the "noise" generated by other users, other

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-19594741452607826382011-04-05T00:25:00.002+01:002011-04-05T00:29:43.179+01:00

I must confess: I don't know how most of the internet based business works. But from what I read, it seems that "pagerank" plus "traffic" is all you need to earn tons of money without actually doing much of value. There seems to be whole operations, called search engine optimizers(*) (or SEOs) devoted to changing a site or a set of sites so that they appear in the top Google search results. How

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-34022648236239891162011-02-27T20:32:00.001Z2011-02-27T22:41:25.971Z

From time to time, I've encountered a few situations that left me thinking about their root causes. Here are a few examples: People joining the development team needs weeks to be able to build the application, install their development environment or both. Worst cases I've seen take months for someone to be productive. Staging environment is terribly out of date. Nobody dares to propose to

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-26270259639087220852011-02-23T00:55:00.000Z2011-02-23T00:55:42.141Z

Suppose you come across some nice guy on the street that makes you the following offer: Hey, man, you really look like a nice person. Can you give me your list of friends, tell me where you are during the day, tell me what your opinions are in related to topics of my choice and generally tell me what/when/if you like or not things I ask about? I’ll get this information from you during your

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-65306559868199969262010-12-18T17:38:00.002Z2010-12-18T17:40:08.221Z

About three hundred years ago, Japan was a country fragmented into many small kingdoms or clans, whose leaders were constantly battling among themselves. Wars were constantly going on between different clans, with each one having to depend on an increasingly sophisticated system that provided the manpower and resources necessary to keep their territories safe and at the same time take advantage

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-34664879597049123442010-11-17T15:06:00.000Z2010-11-17T15:06:53.274Z

I've been trying for weeks to write a piece on ITIL that did not sounded vindictive or bitter. I really wanted to be fair on ITIL, or to be more precise, I'm all in favor of having some kind of change control and IT management in place. But having to go through the ITIL recommended change management processes a couple of times has revealed me the true costs and overhead of ITIL. I'm currently

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-75152411952562899942010-10-31T10:09:00.000Z2010-10-31T10:09:50.667Z

I had recently a question from one developer about the different ways that Oracle has to declare a string column. He was specifically confused between VARCHAR2(xx), VARCHAR(xx) and finally VARCHAR2(CHAR xx). Short answer: forget about VARCHAR, use always VARCHAR2. The difference is related to how it handles Unicode characters. VARCHAR2(xx) will have room for xx bytes, where VARCHAR2(CHAR xx)

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-19324011937326115272010-10-15T00:28:00.000+01:002010-10-15T00:28:26.403+01:00

Helping customers get the most out of their systems is good and interesting job. One gets to know a lot of industry sectors, processes and ways of working, as well as some good people. Invariably, the job involves reading code. And writing code, usually a tiny fraction of the whole body, because you focus on the parts that provide most benefit to your customer. Whenever I wrote code, I always

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-18388880699952180872010-06-16T22:02:00.000+01:002010-06-16T22:02:22.503+01:00

I've never been on the buying side of some work for hire sites, but I'm sure that they offer the potential buyer the option of  targeting to a single person a concrete job offer, because sometimes I get job offers that are not visible to the rest of the pool. Forgive me for the self promotion, I only can say in my defence that (a) I'm not making this up and (b) customer loyalty is one of the

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-760050605640205552010-05-10T08:32:00.000+01:002010-05-10T08:32:52.101+01:00

Any tuning effort will touch parts of a system. Some of them touch the database, others the client application, others the middleware layer, and some change them all. One element thus that measures the effort required for tuning is the number of system elements that have been changed. It is reasonable to assume that the more components you touch, the more complex the tuning is. But I've

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-74032248306493161162010-05-01T01:00:00.001+01:002010-05-01T01:01:24.388+01:00

In case you've not noticed, this blog is entering its third year. Just like many other things you do in life, I had more than one reason to start putting my thoughts in writing. I've already forgotten some of the reasons, and some new ones will also appear over time. But I keep posting. Nevertheless, here are some of them, in no particular order. I wanted to have a means to vent my frustration

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-30540770183441436012010-04-20T10:11:00.000+01:002010-04-20T10:11:07.431+01:00

Hey, after a long pause, and after having glossed over how nice NoSQL databases are, we finally arrive to the blood and tears part. The one that generates controversy. Even passion. Which is a lot to say and gives the debate a new twist outside of the usual rational (some even are relational) database folks. That's why I'm using as a headline for each point some of the more passional statements

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-15809759943946502792010-04-05T22:27:00.002+01:002010-04-05T22:31:19.511+01:00

After some background, we can now dissect the reasons that have created the sudden interest for NoSQL data stores. First, let's separate interest from hype. Hype is the part that says that NoSQL is good for everything, that everyone not using it has no future. The phenomenon of hype in technology is so interesting and complex that it deserves its own post. Well, a collection of them, really.

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-37026964239329290862010-04-03T18:23:00.002+01:002010-04-03T19:01:03.351+01:00

It had to happen. Apparently, it all started with a post from Ted Dzuiba provocatively titled "I can't wait for NoSQL to die" The Internet is a wonderful thing. Twenty years ago, someone expressing these kind of ideas would hardly go noticed, unless he was on a very influential position. But people in such positions tend to try to not angry anyone. Thanks to the Internet, the ensuing

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-8873669361764119222010-02-19T10:20:00.004Z2010-03-01T19:44:38.791Z

The last version of the SANS Top 25 is out. This is a list of the top 25 most dangerous security errors committed in programming. It's an interesting read for anyone who cares about security, and if you're like me, you'll recognize in the list some sins from the past perpetrated by yourself. There is however one that caught my attention. Number 11 is the use of hard coded credentials.

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-76012490242265790022010-01-22T10:06:00.002Z2010-01-22T11:13:20.912Z

Astrology. Those in the prediction business have a rare ability to come up year after year each December giving predictions on what is going to happen in the next 12 months. Astrology is always trying to appear insightful, while being as generic as possible in their predictions, just in case anyone remembers their predictions and try to verify any facts along the way. But I've found a much

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-89536884863610741792010-01-03T20:28:00.001Z2010-01-03T20:29:41.565Z

Warning: post completely unrelated to database optimization. In a sense, it is related to process performance analysis. You may find a lot of disadvantages of being the "never appointed but acting as" family computer technician. Oh yes, other family members reading this probably are remembering the day that they did this or that on dad's computer and thinking that I'm exaggerating and being

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-81333798687409712532009-11-15T12:13:00.002Z2009-11-15T20:34:36.932Z

All this industry talk about cloud computing is, more than ever, placing under the spotlight the true cost of IT infrastructure. Combined with the current economic climate, this is sparkling an interesting and refreshing debate on what is the actual cost of supporting and growing an IT infrastructure. And more and more, a realistic cost breakdown of how much each piece of the infrastructure is

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-48703636023774253392009-11-07T17:16:00.006Z2009-11-07T17:25:32.160Z

I've noticed lately an increased tendency for the so-called "Tactical Solutions" in big organizations. Those are usually focusing their IS efforts around a few key systems, termed the "Strategic" ones. Strategic is synonym of big, complex and ambitious. I've always heard the term "tactical solution" used to denote something that was put together quickly, without paying too much attention to the

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-45391205667509427752009-10-29T22:13:00.003Z2009-10-29T22:17:21.548Z

From what I read, the general feeling is that there are two irreconcilable factions in the cloud/no cloud debate: those that go for it and those that do not. For such a highly technical topic, I'm surprised to see GAE being debated at almost emotional levels. In one side, there are folks that look like Google fanboys and see nothing but advantages for your business to host things in GAE. The

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-11715227266231509302009-09-21T07:56:00.004+01:002009-09-21T08:14:40.120+01:00

I came across this post by no other than Kent Beck. It's no wonder how he has developed the status he has in the industry today: he is a very good communicator. What could take me half a book to describe, Beck can do in three paragraphs. This style of communication is a perfect fit for the eternally busy business people that cannot take away his eyes off the BlackBerry for more than fifteen

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-32017665400270073622009-07-09T09:00:00.001+01:002009-07-09T09:02:14.229+01:00

According to the Wikipedia definition:"A market is any one of a variety of different systems, institutions, procedures, social relations and infrastructures whereby persons trade, and goods and services are exchanged, forming part of the economy. It is an arrangement that allows buyers and sellers to exchange things"I'm neither economics nor market expert. But certainly that definition implies

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-89026367788904818832009-07-02T14:17:00.007+01:002009-07-02T22:18:52.087+01:00

Perhaps I'm not lucky and I always end up working with old systems, but I've become increasingly irritated by a practice that should have died years ago: the flat text file interface. In the stone age era, this was the standard way of exchanging data between systems, as the plethora of options that integration technologies have been creating in the last 20 years or so were not available.Probably

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-83141231764878075202009-06-19T16:22:00.004+01:002009-06-19T16:31:54.891+01:00

One of the last tuning gigs I was involved with was related to a content recommendation system. The original implementation was a one by one translation of a statistics algorithms into SQL sentences. It generated a huge number of precalculations stored in a multi million record table that were later on reused when visitors were looking for content. It was even worse than that, as the result size

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-16061335765552191542009-03-23T18:06:00.008Z2009-03-24T10:32:31.452Z

The history of application development is littered with inventions addressing the problem of filling the conceptual gap between a machine serially executing some instructions acting on data and a business person trying to automate some process. Over the years, layer upon layer of abstractions have been developed, from assemblers, compilers, operating systems to the highly abstracted REST and SOA

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-75438387614407011382009-03-23T13:28:00.019Z2009-03-24T10:33:58.575Z

I've continued exploring Google AppEngine since my last post. Honestly, I've not had much time to devote to self education or blogging lately, so at this moment my opinions are not yet based on real world, live application, experience. And they are mostly opinions, not hard, evidence based, facts.GAE fundamentalsI'm new to Phyton and Django. Both of them have been a pleasant surprise. The Phyton

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-84883006951041770492009-02-04T09:50:00.011Z2009-03-02T08:22:00.136Z

One of the much maligned performance drags an application can have is its abuse of the so called Entity Attribute-Value (EAV) model for data storage. However, as with many catastrophic events, the performance problem is the result of the failure of multiple elements in the decision chain. Let's examine the motivations behind the EAV on each of the parties involved.The buyer (or designer)

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-89965323438479396492009-01-28T12:21:00.002Z2009-01-28T13:02:52.375Z

How things have changed, that what I was thinking when I finished the install of SQL Server Express edition.But, as almost always, I've started with the end of the story. A close relative is soon going to change roles at work. She's moving to a system administration position, where, among other tasks, she's going to have to deal with a lot of MS SQL server tasks. I was therefore asked about the

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-90040920030425663882008-11-27T11:51:00.004Z2008-11-27T12:24:43.592Z

Future performance optimizationsWhile learning about the Oracle 11g invisible index feature, I really became aware of how complex the modern cost based optimizers have become. Essentially, Oracle has added a feature to its cost based optimizer that allows you to make an index invisible to its optimizer.This brought to me fond memories from when I had to revisit an already tuned statement, as

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-34034710340805785162008-11-14T09:15:00.005Z2008-11-14T09:23:01.008Z

It has been a long time ago since my post about tuning tools, but I found a very interesting paper written by some of the best people in the database world. There is a point where they say"... Moreover, at the current time, the automatic tuning aids in the RDBMSs that we are familiar with do not produce systems with anywhere near the performance that a skilled DBA can produce. Until the tuning

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-60445645661190963082008-11-14T08:35:00.004Z2008-11-14T09:30:12.405Z

This post was going to be quite large, and hopefully entertaining. This post took me the good part of an hour to write and was, I supposed, interesting to those upgrading or about to upgrade to Ubuntu 8.10Unfortunately, this post (well, its first version) was written as a mail message to a @blogspot account. Of course, and given the volume of mail that I handle on my day to day job, I usually

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-79201968476353579092008-10-22T23:12:00.000+01:002008-10-22T23:33:17.984+01:00

Classic MysterySometimes, performance problems can be like a classic mystery novel. Hey, just a bit of fantasy sometimes help to get the stage. Here we are, surrounded by the usual suspects, and pondering which one is the most likely to blame. And then the underdog detective comes up pointing to the least likely person to have committed the murder. Of course, all the police detectives that have

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-88697876411367366362008-10-15T12:37:00.000+01:002008-10-15T12:44:58.161+01:00

In the beginning, there was timesharing In the beginning, there was timesharing. This was in the early, early days of computing, before most of us were even born. At the time, computers were big, expensive, complex and extremely difficult to operate. Not to mention underpowered in comparison with, say, a domestic media player. Since most business did not have the resources -read money- or even

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-21769537621139483742008-09-15T15:32:00.000+01:002008-09-15T15:44:22.935+01:00

How things came to be this wayAnyone involved long enough in software development ends up discovering a truth that is long ago known by other craftsmen and engineers: each problem is best solved with the tool more appropriate to solve it. Only problem for software is, it is such a young discipline that is all the time trying to tackle new problems not previously solved. Thus, sometimes it's very

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-14159789166701260882008-07-28T11:36:00.000+01:002008-07-28T11:45:39.255+01:00

While browsing the database forums, it has come to my attention that some people are looking closer at their database system memory management and trying to adjust its configuration settings.Of course, the more complex the database the more parameters you can change. RDBMS's like Oracle for example have dozens of different parameters that can alter the memory usage of the database to better fit

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-11290262394172739832008-07-10T13:18:00.000+01:002008-07-10T13:26:03.776+01:00

Some of the biggest performance problems I've seen came from perfectly reasonable decisions made from fairly intelligent people. Specially, good developers coming from procedural programming languages trying to adapt the paradigms they know to the SQL language. I think that there's a strong parallelism between these cases and some of the most cited problems with people new to object oriented

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-6323062320152662722008-07-03T08:40:00.000+01:002008-07-03T08:44:43.998+01:00

It's almost universal. And unavoidable. Yet I'm not sure if it's right. But it's true. At almost any organization whose goal is to develop and maintain software, there is a knowledge based hierarchy. The best and brightest individual tend to take care of the more complex issues with programming and architecture. The juniors and newcomers are assigned lowest value added tasks. Usually,

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-7231161216563214532008-05-20T14:27:00.000+01:002008-05-20T14:39:39.166+01:00

Businesses are always looking for predictability. From financial plans that span three years to operational plans for next year, to five year strategic plans, there is a good amount of time and resources at any business devoted just to predict what the future is going to look like. Entire business functions are needed to create the plans and track its evolution. And the stock market regularly

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-20341432698947157252008-05-14T15:00:00.000+01:002008-05-14T15:05:17.642+01:00

While the technical part of database performance tuning is almost different in each case, on the business side of things I run almost always into the same conversations. My favorite one is the conversation with potential customers. These follows more or less the same structure. And it always begins with the same sentences:-Customer: our application has performance problems, we're looking for

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-2011082243389336352008-05-07T12:21:00.000+01:002008-05-07T13:22:53.449+01:00

As any other field where a certain skill level is reached, performance tuning for the uninitiated becomes some kind of magical black art beyond certain point. It's then part of your skill set to try to explain in terms that a non specialist can understand, what you're really doing. (and they are paying for)This is the point where excessive simplification can, and in fact does, give you problems.

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-23824282761614149912008-05-07T12:06:00.000+01:002008-05-07T12:19:38.517+01:00

Nobody likes to stop the press, the train or the plane, or the cash collection, or whatever process their business is engaged on, waiting for a computer to finish its task. Nobody likes having to fit the process ("list of deliveries will not be available until 11:30 in the morning") to the timing of a machine. Those are usually the symptoms of a computer system not performing up to the business

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-72236487910105933372008-04-18T08:19:00.000+01:002008-04-18T08:24:25.683+01:00

Older readers may remember the MSDOS extended and expanded memory standards. Back in the pre Windows 95 era, Intel machines were limited in the memory address space they could use. Not only because of the hardware, that until the 386 processor was limited to 16MB (yes, MB, not GB!) of RAM, but also limited by the MS-DOS compatibility constraints. There's a famous quote misattributed to Bill Gates

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-61845765381951245732008-04-14T22:42:00.000+01:002008-04-14T23:13:31.911+01:00

One of the most difficult parts of the engagement with a potential customer is the time to discuss your rates. Specially in comparison with the rates usually paid for other kind of professional services involving technology. Let's explore some of the reasons and the economies behind database performance tuning efforts.The ratesWith the recent wave of out/off/shoring, rates for services in the IT

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8313371909933476764.post-66876443304064610102008-04-08T13:36:00.000+01:002008-04-09T07:45:55.049+01:00

Think about it. When was the last time you heard about your application being slow? Every day? week? month? When was the last time you heard from some business manager “we could do X more/better if the system could be more responsive”? Lots of times. How many processes in your business have their schedule and deadlines dictated by machine execution times? I'm sure that you'll find a few, some of

Consultuninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07362336620660791545noreply@blogger.com0