Comments on: A review of Optimizing Oracle Performance by Cary Millsap

By: RobB

RobB — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 14:40:30 +0000

Just to clarify as it comes up in the related performance post. I think the middle M in M/M/m for exponential service_time isn’t a valid assumption for a typical service time and checking the link to wikipedia Kendall notation an M/D/m model is the valid assumption, especially for the book example.

By: RobB

RobB — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 12:57:03 +0000

I’m a long time Oracle user, and to provide a counterpoint to all the good reviews, this is one of the most disappointing books I’ve read. The basis is good in suggesting a solid methodology is the best way to diagnose performance issues. I found the method description a bit repetitive, well over half the book, and also too much of a sales pitch to the author’s own tools at times. I then started skimming the queueing theory chapter until I couldn’t believe the verdict of the worked example(pg 266 – In summary how many servers do you need for a 100 users executing a 0.49s sql statement 4 times a minute with 95% sub 1s response. The answer being it wasn’t possible!!). I had to then flick back to pg245 to find out why. The author does correctly say test this on your own system but the assumption used in example used an exponential distribution of response time. 0.49s is the average but the most common response time nearly 3 (e) times more likely is 0s. It quickly explains that just with the exponential tail over 10% of the 0.49s take over 1s, hence 95% rule can’t ever be met. As I said the author does urge you to test this assumption, but this test is assuming zero contention, I’d expect 0.48/0.51s maybe due to internal fluctuations but a very tight normal distribution. I definitely don’t think that a 1 minute reporting query is 3 times more likely to finish instantly. I also found the case studies weak in that typical data dictionary and especially Oracle wait interface queries would pick up the issues, as long as the investigator was using at least a reasonable methodology. I don’t want to be too harsh in this as there are good insights in it but I’d never recommend it over any Tom Kyte book (He literally transformed the Oracle technical book scene ,with his proof by example), or the excellent, pragmatic, real life experienced High Performance MySQL book. I’m now just waiting for a definitive hands on real world example Postgres book.

By: Cary Millsap: Thinking Clearly about Performance at Xaprb

Cary Millsap: Thinking Clearly about Performance at Xaprb — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 15:52:29 +0000

[...] a lot more from mk-query-digest if you read this paper — and you should also read his book, reviewed here. It’s one of the top books on my Essential Books [...]

By: Response-time optimization in systems that are queued at Xaprb

Response-time optimization in systems that are queued at Xaprb — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 03:28:48 +0000

[...] Millsap’s Method R and Peter Zaitsev’s Goal-Driven Performance Optimization. Cary wrote an excellent book about his method, and I recommend buying that book and reading it at least twice. These methods are guaranteed to [...]

By: Broosk Johnson

Broosk Johnson — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:31:37 +0000

I agree, this is the best performance book I’ve read.

Using this methodology I was able turn a traditional enterprise software solution that was struggling to support one large customer into a SAS solution handling 200 customers in one database. The solution wasn’t pretty at times, but it worked. And when I worked there this solution was running on SQL Server, so these tuning concepts apply to all databases and performance tuning in general.

I also recommend reading Tom Kyte’s books. They are more Oracle based, but I find many of the concepts carry over to other databases.