AST - Services - Performance Tuning/Troubleshooting

When you have a performance issue or a database problem that is impacting your users, it is never more important to have experience on your side. It is on such occasions where AST's many years of experience have succeeded in providing problem-solving and bringing our clients through a tough database issue.

The expertise of AST's professional services can help you find and fix database performance problems by using the best tuning methodologies\tools to discover problems that fall beyond the range of the monitoring capabilities of those tools:

(1) Following a set of best practices based on years of Oracle performance tuning and troubleshooting experience, we begin by developing an understanding of your needs and system issues.
(2) We then identify performance bottlenecks and wasted resources and recommend changes to improve performance.
(3) These recommendations are then tested and a deployment plan is developed.
(4) Changes are implemented, and we work with you to monitor performance gains and continue to tune until your scalability and performance goals are met.

Our team of skilled and experienced consultants can tune your system for SQL statement tuning, instance tuning, OS tuning, and include hardware and SAN troubleshooting and tuning. Our team will analyze your system and work with your team to:

- Improve database performance and response time
- Minimize downtime and expenses
- Make the best use of current hardware and software
- Achieve your scalability and performance goals
- Reduce future risk of poor performance

Our team can work on-site or remotely to profile, analyze and tune your system so that you can get the maximum performance from your servers, storage, network and database. We have performed these services for many customers with great success, and our proven plan of action includes the following:

System Performance Analysis - We listen to you in order to understand the purpose for your system, what your users are doing, and what their requirements are.

Hardware Assessment - We will monitor system performance and check for disk I/O rates and latencies, CPU, and memory usage. We will attempt to identify and isolate specific performance issues and I/O bottlenecks. We will analyze the current configuration of your network, server and storage systems, including RAID levels and determine whether server and storage settings or versions of software/firmware are optimal, and make recommendations for appropriate changes.

Database Server Analysis - We will typically begin by collecting Oracle or SQL Server and OS statistics to determine the overall health and usage of the system. Tuning recommendations are then presented.

Stored Procedure and SQL Analysis - We also look at the system in terms of what it is doing and try to determine if performance can be improved by either modifying SQL statements or execution plans.

Schema Analysis - We will analyze the database schema in order to determine whether or not changes should be made. These changes may be immediate, such as a new index, or long term, such as partitioning or distributing the database.

Application Architecture - We will talk with your developers and determine whether architectural changes are recommended, such as the use of a transaction monitor, cluster, or changes to indexes or database layout.