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Best Practices: Tuning and Monitoring Database System Performance

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Outline for Best Practices paper
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See best practices for the performance evolution of a Data Server. From important principles of initial hardware and software configuration to monitoring techniques that help you understand system performance under both operational and troubleshooting conditions. For troubleshooting performance problems, this paper provide a step-wise, methodical method for determining the problem.


Introduction

Most DB2 systems go through something of a “performance evolution”. The system must first be configured, both from hardware and software perspectives. In many ways, this sets the stage for how the system behaves when it is in operation. Then, after the system is deployed, a diligent DBA monitors system performance, in order to detect any problems that might develop. If such problems develop, we come to the next phase – troubleshooting. Each phase depends on the previous ones, in that without proper preparation in the previous phase, we are much more likely to have difficult problems to solve in the current phase.

This paper presents DB2 system performance best practices following this same progression. We begin by touching on a number of important principles of hardware and software configuration that can help ensure good system performance. Then we discuss various monitoring techniques that help you understand system performance under both operational and troubleshooting conditions. Lastly, because performance problems can occur despite our best preparations, we talk about how to deal with them in a step-wise,methodical fashion.


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Outline for Best Practices paper

  • Executive summary
  • Introduction
  • The first step: configuring for good performance
    • Hardware configuration
    • AIX configuration
    • Solaris and HP-UX configuration
    • Linux configuration
    • DB2 Data Partitioning Feature
    • Choice of code page and collation
    • Physical database design
    • Initial DB2 configuration settings
    • DB2 autonomics and automatic parameters
    • Explicit configuration settings
    • Statistics collection
    • Considerations for SAP and other ISV environments
  • The next step: monitoring system performance
    • A good 'starter set' of DB2 snapshot metrics
    • Other important data to collect
    • Cross-partition monitoring in partitioned database environments
  • Performance Tuning and Troubleshooting
    • Types of problems that you might see
    • Disk bottlenecks
    • CPU bottlenecks
    • Memory bottlenecks
    • 'Lazy System' bottlenecks
    • System bottlenecks — The overall picture
  • Localized and system-wide troubleshooting
  • Best practices
  • Conclusion
  • Further reading
    • Contributors
  • Notices
    • Trademarks


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Download

" Tuning and Monitoring Database System Performance " (October 2008)
See best practices for the performance evolution of a Data Server. From important principles of initial hardware and software configuration to monitoring techniques that help you understand system performance under both operational and troubleshooting conditions. For troubleshooting performance problems, this paper provide a step-wise, methodical method for determining the problem. (pdf; 804KB; 58 pages)



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Comment, edit, or add your own insights to the Tuning and Monitoring Database System Performance best practices on the IBM Database Wiki.

Check out all the other Best Practices papers and see how you can improve your experience with DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows.




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