The University of Chicago has one of the best economics departments in the world. Their school of business is right there too. Their Gleacher Center in downtown Chicago has a nice lounge and a bunch of quotes from the Nobel Laureates who taught at Chicago. It is really interetsing.
The main purpose of economics is to understand and help alleviate poverty, and there is an intimate and transparent relation between investments in human capital and the alleviation of poverty.
Gary S. Becker
Mathematics has no symbols for confused ideas.
George J. Stigler
If you torture the data long enough, nature will confess.
Ronald H. Coase
When I first discovered options, I became very excited about the possibility that there was a contract that enabled you to only be able to take the upside of the return and not the downside. And that being able to take the upside only had value-and that was really exciting.
Myron S. Scholes
When one contemplates the powerful impact of sustained economic growth on human welfare, it is hard to think about anything else.
Robert E. Lucas Jr.
By investing in themselves, people can enlarge the range of choices available to them. It is one way free men can enhance their welfare.
Theodore W. Schultz
The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.
Milton Friedman.
It is a rare public policy that promotes fairness and social justice and, at the same time, promotes productivity in the economy.
James J. Heckman
One cannot understand current political and ethical trends, or properly forecast future economic developments, without understanding the cycles in religious feelings in American history and the social, economic and political movements that they have generated.
Robert W. Fogel
What counts is what you do with your money, not where it came from.
Merton H. Miller
Thursday, April 29, 2010
System Performance
Over my career, I have focused on Oracle Performance and System Performance in general. I worked at Hotsos which was one of the best companies in the world on the topic of Oracle performance. Hotsos pioneered a product around Workload Characterization which was a mainframe approach and Method-R pioneered by Cary Millsap.
At Hotsos, I came up with this approach for System Performance and hope this helps.
Workload Characterization:
Workload characterization is the process of logging and tracking work done in the database by users and its associated computing costs. This data than can be studied to understand the nature of the workload and its overall impact.
Workload can be handled in one of five ways.
Eliminate – Clearly the easiest option to pursue due to the minimal effort involved and simple procedures needed to accomplish this step. We estimate that 25-50% of workload in any system is waste and can be easily eliminated and processes put in place to avoid the recurrence of the workload
Tune – If the workload is a useful workload (i.e. work is accomplished by the user), we can then assess if it needs to be tuned by using Method R. This usually involves tuning of SQL statements to consume less Logical I/O’s and computing resources like parsing etc. If the resource consumption of computing is still high, an assessment needs to be made on whether the complexity of the business requirement is worth the cost of the computing necessary to accomplish this workload. This is a hard business question and needs to be answered keeping all the stakeholders interest in mind.
Train – We find that well tuned programs can suffer from runaway workload by improper desktop procedures or user not trained to use the functionality of the software to efficiently accomplish their work. This is true in Order Management where a blind search for Orders and Customers can potentially take down the database with its demand of resources.
Reschedule – Sometimes, large batch workload runs during peak hours creating a competition for resources and slows all the workload on the system. In this case, this workload will need to be rescheduled to a non-peak time. This can be difficult in global system where there are no non-peak windows except for a small time on the weekend.
Relocate – Ad-Hoc Reports and Batch reports can be potentially made to run on a copy of the production database thereby offloading the workload demand off to the reporting database. This can significantly reduce the competition for resources and improve overall workload throughput.
The order in which to approach it economically is
1.) Eliminate
2.) Train
3.) Re-schedule
4.) Tune/Optimize Code
5.) Re-locate
Thanks
Mahesh
At Hotsos, I came up with this approach for System Performance and hope this helps.
Workload Characterization:
Workload characterization is the process of logging and tracking work done in the database by users and its associated computing costs. This data than can be studied to understand the nature of the workload and its overall impact.
Workload can be handled in one of five ways.
Eliminate – Clearly the easiest option to pursue due to the minimal effort involved and simple procedures needed to accomplish this step. We estimate that 25-50% of workload in any system is waste and can be easily eliminated and processes put in place to avoid the recurrence of the workload
Tune – If the workload is a useful workload (i.e. work is accomplished by the user), we can then assess if it needs to be tuned by using Method R. This usually involves tuning of SQL statements to consume less Logical I/O’s and computing resources like parsing etc. If the resource consumption of computing is still high, an assessment needs to be made on whether the complexity of the business requirement is worth the cost of the computing necessary to accomplish this workload. This is a hard business question and needs to be answered keeping all the stakeholders interest in mind.
Train – We find that well tuned programs can suffer from runaway workload by improper desktop procedures or user not trained to use the functionality of the software to efficiently accomplish their work. This is true in Order Management where a blind search for Orders and Customers can potentially take down the database with its demand of resources.
Reschedule – Sometimes, large batch workload runs during peak hours creating a competition for resources and slows all the workload on the system. In this case, this workload will need to be rescheduled to a non-peak time. This can be difficult in global system where there are no non-peak windows except for a small time on the weekend.
Relocate – Ad-Hoc Reports and Batch reports can be potentially made to run on a copy of the production database thereby offloading the workload demand off to the reporting database. This can significantly reduce the competition for resources and improve overall workload throughput.
The order in which to approach it economically is
1.) Eliminate
2.) Train
3.) Re-schedule
4.) Tune/Optimize Code
5.) Re-locate
Thanks
Mahesh
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