Relational Database Performance Monitoring for Multiple Platforms

The Precise Platform proactively monitors, analyzes, and tunes IBM DB2 databases to keep your DB2 UDB-based applications available and performing at peak efficiency. The Precise Platform captures, measures, and correlates performance metrics from all crucial system components. These metrics give DBAs a complete view of application performance and helps improve end-user response time while maximizing the return on technology investment.

24x7 DB2 Monitoring

The Precise Platform facilitates the proactive tuning approach. It provides 24x7, detailed operating system and DB2 application statistics with low overhead. These statistics may be correlated and viewed by DB2 program, by statement, by user, by time element, and most importantly by resource consumption. Thus the proactive DBA has many ways to identify potential bottlenecks and take corrective action before end-users are adversely affected.

Maximize Your Investment

Without detailed performance statistics, it is impossible to determine if performance problems are due to hardware or software inefficiencies. Often new hardware is purchased unnecessarily when application tuning would have resulted in better performance gains at a lower cost. Experience shows that 20% of the statements are responsible for 80% of the resource usage in most databases. If attention is paid to tuning this taxing 20%, serious gains in DB2 and application performance can be made without any hardware upgrades.

Rewrite SQL Statements

SQL is a rich language. Often statements can be written in many ways to provide the same result set. These different statements can result in the DB2 optimizer choosing different access paths into the database. Some access paths can be many times more efficient than others. The Precise Platform identifies the problem statements, provides easy to understand graphical explain plans, displays the optimized text generated by the DB2 optimizer, and allows the user to test alternative statements while providing a framework for easy alternative statement comparison.

Manage Indexes

Where alternative SQL statements cannot be generated (for example in third-party applications) it is often necessary to add indexes to help tune your worst offending statements. While adding the index will positively effect the statement you are tuning, you do not know what impact it will have on the rest of the system or if other statements also start using the index with a negative impact. Traditionally, this has meant either a ‘try it and see’ approach or major re-testing on a test machine. The Precise Platform collects statements over time in a data warehouse and gives visibility to which statements access which tables or indexes or which indexes aren’t being used at all. Using this information you can easily understand the effectiveness of each index, plan new indexes, and remove non-effective indexes to minimize the risk of changes in the operational environment.

Drop Redundant Indexes

It can be very difficult to determine if an index is being used within a production environment because indexes, whether used or not, must be maintained by DB2. Having many unused indexes creates unnecessary overhead on the database. The Precise Platform allows a DBA to identify unused indexes so they can be removed, freeing up system resources.