Guidelines for SQL Performance Tuning Every DBA Must Know

One thing that every database admin dreads is to receive a barrage of calls from disgruntled users protesting about the slow performance of their database online. Ideally, SQL performance tuning is among the most helpful methods to determine the cause for delays when the system gets too slow or unresponsive. It can also maintain your infrastructure’s ability to manage greater loads. 

SQL performance tuning: Most Important Tips

In case your database is not performing as well as it should, there are many strategies you can apply in order to repair any potential causes. Let’s take a look at these five SQL performance tuning tips to ensure that you can make the most of the database hardware and keep everything completely functional. 

Why Baselines are Essential

Sustaining a specific performance baseline is one of the best ways to tune your database’s performance. This is because you will be able to refer to it in case you suspect an issue. By conveniently determining peak phases of usage, you can assign performance benchmarks and be sure of the particular capabilities of the system in question.

Moreover, you need to evaluate the current performance of your database on a consistent and regular basis as it offers accurate expectations of how it is supposed to operate. This is quite useful in the event of tuning any hindrances which you are sure to encounter in the future. 

Using the Automatic Workload Repository to Monitor your Database

The AWR or the Automatic Workload Repository is probably the most valuable SQL performance tuning features. It not only gathers but also processes and maintains all the statistics related to database performance.

As a monitoring tool, it provides frequent insights into your database’s functioning. These stats can help you make use of the ADDM or the Automatic Database Diagnostic Monitor to gain further details about the information shared by the AWR. Using both the AWR and the ADDM will greatly improve your SQL performance tuning capabilities and conserve resources at the same time.

Monitoring your figures is Important for Tracking Performance

Apart from utilizing the features mentioned above, you need to maintain a complete collection of statistics for the operating system, software as well as the database at all times. SQL query performance tuning is not just repairing a few issues; it must be one of the main components across the complete life cycle of any software.

The most efficient way of doing this is to repeatedly verify your statistics and making adjustments in the way they are collected as well as presented. The signs of performance issues are often discovered in the data, which is why you cannot neglect the details that can be the decisive element in honing your performance tuning skills. 

Make sure that the CPU is Optimally Used

There are certain times when the automatic diagnostic functionalities simply aren’t good enough for fixing the issue at hand. That is when you may need to use manual methods for tuning. Whenever you are analyzing situations like these, you must keep an eye on whether the CPU is being sufficiently utilized or not. 

Keeping a check on the number of CPU resources being used in the user space will confirm whether there are any unrelated processes keeping its utilization limited. In other words, you can find out if there are any other tasks that are consuming system resources. Once you have determined CPU utilization, it gets a lot simpler to handle any problems related to SQL performance tuning, which further simplifies your process of making decisions. 

Enhance Oracle Analysis through SQL performance tuning

Although SQL is thought to be more of a messaging language since queries are entered and information is received in return, there are client tools that are unable to create efficient SQL queries. As a result, these badly-written SQL queries affect the performance of your database in a negative manner.

Strengthen your evaluation system with the help of our tuning tools to enact performance tuning and head over to our website to see how we can assist you in effectively monitoring your Oracle databases.