1. Toad® Database Administration Best Practices
Title side – introduce yourself and determine what the roles are of the people in the room so you can tweak your presentation accordingly.
Presenter

2. Production Database Pressure Points
End Users
Developers
A discussion around this topic is important as it focuses on the issues which will eventually impact the Production database if nothing is done.
Database developers have two types of change that are escalated into the production environment: new development and tuning existing code. New development consists of new functions and features that are pushed into production. Tuning existing code arises if the development process breaks down or the changes are not tested well enough. This will cause performance issues to arise in production.
Untuned or poor quality code from Development will also compromise what the DBA is trying to do to mitigate risk to the database and maintain acceptable levels of uptime and performance and so enable them to plan more accurate upgrade strategies.
The big unknown is increased user activity which could be a result of natural organic growth or due to mergers or acquisitions.
DBAs

3. What is “Best Practice” ?
A set of guiding principles proposed by industry leading experts
Acknowledgement that the application is part of an evolving lifecycle which will continue to iterate over a period of time
Determination to deliver a quality product or what we used to call “taking pride in your work” !
Why use it ?
Involve the customer in what Best Practice means to them. They will probably already know what some of it is or understand its concept
Why do we need Database Development Best Practices?
The development cycle is carefully planned so when issues arise in production, it causes a reactive process to occur. Depending on the severity of the performance issues, future development cycles can be impacted, productivity lost and the bottom line affected. When these issues arise, it is usually due to problematic code and therefore it is the responsibility of the developers to identify and resolve this poorly performing code.
In an age of outsourcing, and multi-skilled developers, whose core focus may not be on database development, there is a pressing need for a process to ensure that code being deployed to production is of the highest quality. Management needs to be certain that the investments that they have made to lower the cost of development are indeed paying off by ensuring they have a process which is both repeatable and measurable via effective reporting.

4. Administration Best Practices
Now we’re going to introduce to you Quest’s methodology for implementing and maintaining Development Best Practices into your organisation’s development process using some of the technology you may already have (if already a Toad for Oracle customer).

5. Toad Database Administration Best Practices
Oracle
SQL Server
DB2

6. Challenges to implementing Best Practice
Resistance to use tools
Already have scripts
Yada yada….
The customer may already be aware that they are challenged by implementing and following what development processes and procedures they already have. This is where we can help. Think about code reviews, code testing, version control, etc, etc.
The slide shows some examples but ask the customer what they think – can they think of any more (this will also help us refine our presentations)

7. Design Access to data model
Ensures development matches business requirements
Ensures data model is correctly optimized
Ensures model integrity is maintained
Version history

8. Deploy (1) DDL Scripts automatically generated from data model
Alter Script generation based on data model updates
Version History retained for auditing
Application scalability testing

9. SQL statement or PL/SQL code scalability profile
Deploy (2)
Will the application work correctly and adequately under production conditions ?
SQL statement or PL/SQL code scalability profile
This final stage of the process will enable management or senior developers/DBAs to assess whether qualifying SQL and PL/SQL code can pass the final scrutiny of scalability testing.
At this stage, rather than assume the customer understands why we are doing this and what it entails, explain the process and why we’re going it now.
When or if SQL or PL/SQL is tuned in development, there is no guarantee it will perform the same in a Production environment with many more users, more data and different Oracle environment. Many applications fail to deliver desired performance for this very reason.
Scalability testing involves simulation of anticipated concurrent userload against a given SQL statement in order that we can measure the change in Response Time as userload increases. If a tuned (re-written) SQL statement performs better compared to it’s original, we can assess whether the same performance is achived when 100s or 1000s of users execute the same statement and graph the outcome.
Re-writes with lower Response Times than others at high user loads are much more likely to scale well in a production environment than those which don’t.
To demo, go back to your previous SQL Optimizer demo window and unselect all re-write scenarios. Now select the top 5 and initiate the SQL Scalability Testing.
After it launches, click the Review Results button and review a pre-prepared test (know which one it is) and discuss the graphs.
Does not scale well
Scales well

10. Detect/Discover Environment (O/S and Database) Instance Performance
Instance Manager
UNIX Monitor
Windows Service Manager
Instance Performance
Database Browser (all instances)
Database Monitor
Database Probe
SQL Performance
SQL Trace/Optimization
ASH Report
Index Monitoring
Space Management
Database Browser
Segment Advisor
Database Browser (all instances)
Database Monitor
Oracle Alert Log analysis
(FTP and Telnet windows)
Database Health Check
Session Browser
ADDM/AWR
StatsPack
Top Session Finder
SQL Monitor
SQL Scan/SQL Detective
(Xpert/Dev Suite)
Space/IO History
Undo Advisor

11. Diagnose Instance Performance SQL Performance Space Management
Database Probe
Database Monitor
Session Browser
Health Check
SQL Performance
Top Session Finder
SQL Trace/Optimization
SQL Optimization (Xpert or Dev Suite)
Space Management
Segment Advisor
Tablespace Map
Identify Space Deficits
Log Switch Frequency Map
Undo Advisor

12. Resolve Instance Performance Schema/Data Integrity SQL Performance
Oracle Parameters
Schema/Data Integrity
Log Miner (access to Undo SQL) Flashback Table
Schema Compare
Data Compare
Data Duplicates
SQL Performance
Explain Plan
SQL Optimization (Xpert or Dev Suite)
Space Management
Rebuild Multiple Objects
Analyze Objects
Repair Chained Rows
Segment Shrink Advisor
DBMS Redefinition Wizard

13. SQL Optimization - How hard can it be to rewrite SQL ?
How many different ways can you write this query?
SELECT EMP_NAME,DPT_NAME,GRD_DESC
FROM EMPLOYEE,
DEPARTMENT DEPARTMENT1,
GRADE
WHERE EMP_GRADE = GRD_ID
AND EMP_DEPT = DPT_ID
AND EXISTS (SELECT 'X'
FROM DEPARTMENT DEPARTMENT2
WHERE DPT_AVG_SALARY IN (SELECT MIN(DPT_AVG_SALARY)
FROM DEPARTMENT DEPARTMENT3)
AND DPT_ID = EMPLOYEE.EMP_DEPT);
30,491 !!!
Teach Yourself SQL in 30,420 Minutes
By Gabriel F. Gargiulo

14. Optimize SQL
Proactively identify problematic SQL directly from the source code
Thorough transformation of SQL producing every possible semantically equivalent rewrite
Optimize SQL in batch in context of source code
Generate replacement script
Automatic ranking of best alternatives
Minimal involvement which can save hours of time
This topic covers an area most developers don’t get anywhere near unless they are senior or experienced. The main things to talk about here must be :
business related (such as reminding about the cost of under-performing applications to the business and how it’s impossible to expect DBAs to tune all SQL and PL/SQL code from development – they just don’t have the bandwidth) and, to a limited extent :
technical. Explain what optimization is and how it’s important for developers because it performs automatically in seconds what a developer could only hope to accomplish in hours, which is re-writing the statement (and even re-writing the rewrites) until every possible combination is determined and assessed. The optimizer will then yield only those statements which have the most chance of giving a performance improvement and the developer can decide, based on Plan Cost, etc, which ones to execute and ultimately make an informed decision as to which to use in the application. The SQL or PL/SQL can then replace the original in the application.
Talk about ease-of-use, how it’s possible to take multiple SQL statements and PL/SQL code and perform a Batch Optimization and mention they can also use this in conjunction with the SQL Scan referred to earlier in Code Xpert.
In your demo, use a tried and tested SQL statement (from the QUEST_OPTI schema) and perform an optimization based on an Intelligence Level between 2 and 4 (4 is much preferred). After optimization is complete, show the Alert tab and discuss number of re-writes generated, etc.
Don’t execute any of the re-writes – instead, have a saved session which you can restore to talk about the execution statistics and comparison graphs.
Leave the SQL Optimizer window open for now – you will need it later.

15. Inform Instance Performance Schema Integrity SQL Performance
ADDM/AWR
StatsPack
Health Check Report (schedulable)
Schema Integrity
Schema Compare
HTML Schema Report (schedulable)
Reports Manager (schedulable)
ER Diagram (Toad Data Modeler)
Master-Detail Browser
SQL Performance
Plan Change Analyzer (Xpert or Dev Suite)
Space Management
Tablespace History
IO History

16. Administer Instance Schema Integrity Space Management Users
ASM Manager
Oracle Parameters
Redo Log Manager
Schema Browser (Rollback Segment, Jobs, Scheduler)
Schema Integrity
Object Audit
NLS Parameters
Export & Import
Space Management
Schema Browser (Tablespaces)
Tablespace Menu
Users
Audit SQL / Sys Privs
Schema Browser (Users, Roles, Object Privs, etc)
DBMS Flashback
Recycle Bin

17. TOAD DB Optimization Check-List