Congratulations on hunting your elephants. The prior blog post was the most popular ever; it has received well over 3,000 hits and continues to ascend in popularity. I readily concede that elephants can wreak havoc in your databases, but there exists a much more dangerous predator of your database's performance: mosquitoes.

Mosquitoes are, on an individual basis, small, inexpensive statements with an apparently low timeron cost, but, when they are executed with high frequency, they will suck the life out of your system and degrade the performance of your business. Two blog posts ago, the topic of statement workload analysis was introduced. If you have not read it yet, please do so now.

[ more .. ]

Hopefully you read the prior blog post on elephants and mosquitoes which discusses different approaches to statement performance analysis. If you haven't read it yet, please do so now. In this post, we will look at ways to hunt and kill your elephants. And, by no means do I favor cruelty to animals in any way, this is just a metaphor. Let us imagine that your phone just rang and your boss is screaming "What's happening RIGHT NOW?!?!?!!?!?" ...

[ more .. ]

It's said that there is more than one way to skin a cat, meaning there are multiple ways to accomplish the same objective. As for the saying, I don't think this is very kind to cats even though I prefer dogs. The prior blog post discussed making adjustments to CHNGPGS_THRESH to reduce, avoid, or mitigate transient "brown outs" in transaction throughput. There is another way...

[ more .. ]

A student who took this class last week at WDUG emailed me the day after to thank me. He said he enjoyed the class and successfully reduced the elapsed time of a troublesome query from two hours to three minutes! If you missed the WDUG session, I hope you will be able to join my Ed Seminar at IDUG "DB2 LUW Performance Diagnosis Learning Lab". This post covers topics related to optimizing Write I/O performance.

[ more .. ]

Understanding Table I/O performance is critically important to properly diagnosing the health and efficiency of a database and pinpointing problems. In fact, if I only had just a few minutes to quickly assess a database, I'd look at 3 key measurements...

[ more .. ]