Too Small to Notice Can Result in Too Big to Ignore

By Scott Hayes, President and Founder, DBI Software

We know that just because something is too small to be detected doesn’t mean that it’s too small to cause potentially catastrophic damage. Don't let your drone-sized problem cause a B-52-like disruption.

These days, there is a lot of talk about drones, and for good reason. Just this year, a drone landed on the White House lawn, and another man was arrested outside the White House as he attempted to get his drone in the air. In 2013, a drone landed at a campaign event within feet of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and drones have been observed flying over sensitive installations from nuclear power plants to government installations—all across the globe.1

We all instinctively recognize the danger that drones pose. We know that just because something is too small to be detected doesn’t mean that it’s too small to cause potentially catastrophic damage.

The same thing is true in my field of databases, where speed is the name of the game—speed to service customers, speed to process orders, speed to turn inventory, and speed to analyze and report. It’s a simple as this: if your database is slow, your business won’t grow.

Imagine with me that your database is a backpack, and you are running a marathon while carrying your backpack. The backpack is heavy, slowing you down, and you want to lighten the load. If you found a five-pound cinderblock in your backpack, it would be an obvious and easy choice to remove. But what if you found five pounds of sand? Like a drone, each grain of sand is small and hard to even notice, yet taken together, the sand constitutes a huge weight. It’s obvious to you that five pounds is five pounds, and that if it’s slowing you down, you should get rid of it.

Our patented, award-winning IBM DB2 optimization tools find what “weighs” the most—whether they are large, obvious things, or the smaller, more drone-like problems that can wreak havoc on a database while flying under the radar. We have a client—a large insurance company in the South. They had certain reports that absolutely, positively had to be done by a certain time in the morning. Because of the slowness of their database, it was an ugly, overnight process.

The team couldn’t understand what the problem was. IBM’s own “performance optimization” tool wasn’t detecting a problem, neither was SAP’s “Cockpit.” As it turned out, the reason was that they were looking for a B-52 instead of a drone—cinder blocks instead of sand. They were looking for big numbers—a rouge statement that was taking 10-15 seconds or 10-20 minutes.

When this company called us in, we quickly discovered that 80% of the batch application time was consumed by three statements, and that each of those three statements had an average response completion time of under half a second—a drone-sized problem causing B-52-like disruption. Thanks to DBI, we were able to tune these processes, and as a result the batch work is now done in an hour instead of overnight. Small things can make a big difference, so it’s imperative to have the ability to detect them.

What You Must Know

Small things can make a big difference, so it’s imperative to have the ability to detect them.

If your IBM DB2 LUW database isn’t keeping up with performance demands, or if you’ve just been handed an emergency purchase request for CPUs and memory - or you want to prevent this from happening in the first place - contact us. We’ll diagnose any database problems for free in about 15 seconds, solve a real root-cause problem in two hours or less, and save you hundreds of thousands of dollars in CPU’s, memory, licenses, consulting fees, and wasted time. Frankly, we’re not very popular with hardware and database license vendors, but your CFO, shareholders, and customers will love us.

What would your business be like if it ran 4x faster? We'll present a methodology and key metrics to help you achieve rapid, measurable, and significant performance gains in your DB2 LUW databases in minutes! Register Now for a Free Webinar.

¹http://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2015/03/18/tsr-dnt-marsh-drones-national-security-threat.cnn

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