What are the most common tuning mistakes or misconceptions?
GKV: A lot of people try to tune the database environment itself rather than look at application first. It’s part of the silver bullet mindset. The database is easy — change a parameter and boom, you made a change. Application tuning takes more effort — finding out what components of the application is the problem stemming from, then the actual task of finding out what is the problem, then analyzing it, then figuring it out. It takes discipline and effort, but not a long drawn effort. If you are in mindset of waving a magic wand, you won’t subscribe to this methodology. You did something before and you expect same thing to happen now, but the parameters may not be there, or they may not do anything because they are no longer relevant. The fundamental goal behind the effort of looking at response time is just to get people to look at the right data, and to wean people away from the old method of looking at a laundry list. It’s humanly impossible to look at 100 databases every day. Eve
