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November 7, 2006
Statspack Rides Again
Dale and I had some fun working with Statspack this week. Statspack is an Oracle tool that helps you tune your database. What you do is take two snapshots of the database about 15 minutes apart. Then you use Statspack to create a (very long) report about all facets of the database. What we did was take the Statspack report from AERO and put it into "Statspack Analyzer", a free tool developed by Oracle guru Don Burleson and Texas Memory Systems (a company that makes "solid state disks" - interesting).
Well, this is a preliminary blog only as we just did manage to get the Statspack Analyzer report before we ran out of time. So, now we will investigate the recommendations made by the Analyzer and see what, if anything, we can do to tune our database. One thing that caught my eye was a recommendation for using "bulk collect" or "forall" data fetches in our applications. Huh?! Well, it's just a way to tell the database to return an entire group of records to you all at once, rather than fetching the records one at a time. We do a lot of this kind of record fetching in our web applications.
I think this is a really interesting area, so we'll see if there is anything we can do to "speed things up" on the database a bit.
Posted by rossm at 10:29 AM | Comments (0)
It's Lights Out for WILB
When I first began delving into the depths of Oracle databases, I had the opportunity to work on upgrading our Oracle Enterprise database version from 8i to 9i. Doesn't sound like much, but it was quite a project involving the installation of the new database and a migration of the 8i data to the 9i platform. That 9i database was named WILB (after the server it was on - Wilbur as in Orville and Wilbur Wright). It served as the production database for WOU for several years.
Time passes and WILB was replaced by our current production database named AERO. AERO was essentially the same Oracle database, just moved to "bigger and better" hardware. Well, moving all of the applications and data from WILB to AERO was an enormous job. I think everyone in UCS had a hand in it one way or another. As just one small example, Summer had to rewrite the entire Admissions application (these are all web applications - so the application that allows prospective students to apply online) as there were just too many changes needed to move it.
Well, to make a long story short, I shut down WILB earlier this week. A couple users noticed it because there were some outdated links on our web page, so they could no longer log in as they were pointed to WILB and not AERO as they should have been. Ron fixed those links straight away, and now WILB is just a memory.
Just so you don't get the idea that we're now finished with anything, the current plan calls for an OS upgrade to Solaris 10 on the Wilbur server, then an installation of Oracle 10g (Oracle's latest-greatest enterprise level database). The new WILB database will be coupled with an upgrade of AERO (also to 10g) then the new WILB will be used as a development database so that AERO will have only production level applications running on it.
Anyway, it's farewell to WILB, but it will be back in a new and better way in the future. Stay tuned....
Posted by rossm at 10:09 AM | Comments (0)