Need a consultant to find the performance issues

[Joan Hsieh]

Hi listers,

We are in need of recommendations for an oracle consultant or a consultant
company who can manage to solve the following issues that we have had on
the production in the past year.

The qualified candidate would be needed to be able to do many things
including:

- Review our existing architecture, make suggestions for
improvements for both the production hardware and software

- Suggest what patches and settings would better improve
performance

- Review past outages, the upgrades and improvements we have made
and assess them

- Find the root cause/causes of performance problems that can't be
adequately addressed by simply “fix this sql” followed by “fix that sql”,
as the problems are more widespread than that.


I think that’s the general idea of the scope of expertise we are looking
for. Thanks for your help.

we are located in Marlborough, MA

Joan H

[Dave Herring]

While I don't have a recommendation for a consultant (or company) but I do
suggest that you and your team rework the expectations of the candidate.
As you listed it you quite possibly may get good results but you risk the
effort being spent on "improvements" which may end up being "throw more
hardware at the solution and we're done" vs. really analyzing the perceived
issue and addressing that first, regardless of what the solution may be.

For example, my assumption is that you have 1 or more production issues
that are negatively affecting production and need additional help in
addressing them. In light of that I believe it'd be important to look for
someone who:

- Can effectively analyze the current state and clearly define what the
problem is/are.
- Have expertise in knowing how to track down issues at various levels.
- Apply understanding of the problem(s) and address the highest impact
first, then proceed to the next highest impact.
- Accurately demonstrate / prove the impact of any changes made.

Maybe I'm being to picky or playing with semantics but I see too often
changes suggested/made that involved almost no understanding of the real
issue and that masked the underlying problem which eventually came back.
For example, I frequently see tickets come in complaining about performance
and the app team wants statistics gathered on x number of tables. Stats
are then gathered and suddenly performance is better (for a while). Were
the underlying objects really stale? Did the change in statistics cause a
different xplan to be chosen or did just flushing the statement (as a
result of stats being gathered) cause a new/better plan to be chosen?
Without knowing this, the next thing you know is any time a performance
issue arises everyone rushes to gather stats regardless of what the real
issue is.

Dave

Post by Joan Hsieh
Hi listers,
We are in need of recommendations for an oracle consultant or a consultant
company who can manage to solve the following issues that we have had on
the production in the past year.
The qualified candidate would be needed to be able to do many things
- Review our existing architecture, make suggestions for
improvements for both the production hardware and software
- Suggest what patches and settings would better improve
performance
- Review past outages, the upgrades and improvements we have made
and assess them
- Find the root cause/causes of performance problems that can't
be adequately addressed by simply “fix this sql” followed by “fix that
sql”, as the problems are more widespread than that.
I think that’s the general idea of the scope of expertise we are looking
for. Thanks for your help.
we are located in Marlborough, MA
Joan H

[Noveljic Nenad]

I recommend considering Stefan Koehler (http://www.soocs.de/). Simply put, he’s by far the best Oracle professional I've ever worked with.

I had the privilege to meet Stefan a couple of years ago when he was hired by our organization to do a SAP upgrade. I didn't know him yet back then – first I thought he was just another SAP dude who executes some application scripts. But soon I was proven badly mistaken. While waiting on the SAP upgrades to finish he started engaging in our DBA discussions. He successfully diagnosed and proposed solutions to complicated performance issues some of which had their root cause in the underlying operating system and were bothering us for a long time. Then he would explain the technical details and his methodology for resolving the problem. And that's another benefit of having Stefan around - your team can learn from him and get better at performance tuning and troubleshooting. In this respect, working together with Stefan was a transformative experience which completely changed the way I approach troubleshooting and performance tuning.

Best regards,

Nenad

http://nenadnoveljic.com/blog/



From: oracle-l-***@freelists.org [mailto:oracle-l-***@freelists.org] On Behalf Of Joan Hsieh
Sent: Dienstag, 25. September 2018 16:27
To: oracle-***@freelists.org
Subject: Need a consultant to find the performance issues

Hi listers,

We are in need of recommendations for an oracle consultant or a consultant company who can manage to solve the following issues that we have had on the production in the past year.

The qualified candidate would be needed to be able to do many things including:

- Review our existing architecture, make suggestions for improvements for both the production hardware and software

- Suggest what patches and settings would better improve performance

- Review past outages, the upgrades and improvements we have made and assess them

- Find the root cause/causes of performance problems that can't be adequately addressed by simply “fix this sql” followed by “fix that sql”, as the problems are more widespread than that.

I think that’s the general idea of the scope of expertise we are looking for. Thanks for your help.

we are located in Marlborough, MA

Joan H
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[Joan Hsieh]

Hi dear listers,

I have received some very exciting recommendations from the list. Thank you
so much for your input. I have forwarded all the responses to the hiring
manager. They will initiate the interview process after evaluating the
candidates.

Thanks again!

Joan

Post by Joan Hsieh
Hi listers,
We are in need of recommendations for an oracle consultant or a consultant
company who can manage to solve the following issues that we have had on
the production in the past year.
The qualified candidate would be needed to be able to do many things
- Review our existing architecture, make suggestions for
improvements for both the production hardware and software
- Suggest what patches and settings would better improve
performance
- Review past outages, the upgrades and improvements we have made
and assess them
- Find the root cause/causes of performance problems that can't
be adequately addressed by simply “fix this sql” followed by “fix that
sql”, as the problems are more widespread than that.
I think that’s the general idea of the scope of expertise we are looking
for. Thanks for your help.
we are located in Marlborough, MA
Joan H