Re: Performance goals for DBAs

On May 31, 9:54 pm, "F" <f...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I would like to know what would be some performance goals for DBAs ? I can
think of customer satisfaction and database availability being some. What
else can I have as performance goals for my DBAs and more important what can
I have as some stretch goals ?

Would love to hear some suggestions on some of the goals you have or provide
to your team.

Thank you

I should preface this by saying that I'm not a DBA, I'm just a guy who
manages a number of production databases. I suspect some would say
this makes me a DBA, but I wouldn't; there's a lot of specialist
skills that a "real" DBA is going to have (especially one with a lot
of Oracle specific experience) that I don't.

With that said, my goals in any database I manage tend to be:

1) Correctness -- it's got to store and retrieve the right data. If
there's a problem with this, nothing else matters
2) Stability -- it's got to be up and available during its committed
windows
3) Recoverable -- if the hardware blows, or a new application patch
decides to narf the data, the backups have to be there to restore the
system
4) Performance -- it's got to perform acceptably for the job at hand

Note that performance is #4 on the list e.g. it's the least important
component for most of my databases. Likewise, not that I said it has
to perform "acceptably for the job at hand" rather than "fast". Key
thing is to realize that different databases are used in different
ways and the definition of "acceptable" is pretty subjective. On a
data warehouse application, being able to pull an overview of last
years sales in 75 seconds might be "blazing fast", whereas on, say, a
trading application, I've got to be in and out in < 50 ms.

Other reason I usually put performance last is it's often beyond my
control. Most of the databases I care for are the back ends for third
party apps, and if those apps make silly queries or have bad data
designs, there's not always anything I can do about it.
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: maximum mmap()
    ... Umm, one of the goals of rrdtool was to create databases with a finite (and ...
    (freebsd-stable)
  • Re: Basic Scripts for Database Administration
    ... It is interesting finding out how people admin their databases as each ... DBA probably thinks that they have the best method. ... My recommendation is to stay away from anything Burleson related. ... servers and range in version from 9i, ...
    (comp.databases.oracle.server)
  • Re: Basic Scripts for Database Administration
    ... It is interesting finding out how people admin their databases as each ... DBA probably thinks that they have the best method. ... servers and range in version from 9i, ... tablespaces, log monitoring, load monitoring, statspack, Data Guard ...
    (comp.databases.oracle.server)
  • Re: Switching ODBC Oracle databases
    ... I believe your DBA should be able to create an "alias" for 9 of the ... databases in the 10th and then you would only have to create the single ODBC ... connection to that one. ... to switch between them based on the value in a combo box. ...
    (microsoft.public.access.externaldata)
  • Re: Mapped and memory based data files
    ... > I have researched a few SQL type database applications but can not ... being able to handle relational databases widens the domain ... happening, now or in the future, within the RDB packages. ... of the time had to wait for a DBA to do for them, ...
    (comp.lang.apl)