Oracle is the world?s most robust and complex database, and along with this tremendous power and flexibility comes great complexity.    Tuning an Oracle database has been likened to working on a car while it flies down the highway at 70 miles per hour.  Thousands of transactions are processed every second and it?s extremely difficult to isolate and repair an Oracle performance problem.

Oracle tuning takes years to master and the internals of SQL optimization have become so complicated that only a seasoned expert can make sense of Oracle tuning.

Enter Ion for Oracle

Ion for Oracle is a revolutionary new tool that encapsulates the tuning techniques used by the world?s top Oracle tuning experts.  Using applied artificial intelligence, Ion for Oracle employs decision support system technology to relieve you of the tedium of querying dozens of cryptic internal tables, placing the salient data right at your fingertips.

How Does Ion work?

The Ion for Oracle architecture was over a decade in the making, designed by Donald K. Burleson, a five-time Oracle Press author and one of the world?s most respected Oracle tuning experts.   Real-time performance monitors have a serious shortcoming in that it is not easy to isolate a single performance metric in a busy database, and even harder to repair a problem while the database is experiencing an acute performance problem.

Ion for Oracle spots hidden workload trends

Ion for Oracle adopts a proactive approach to performance tuning.  By automatic the analysis of past trends, predictive models can be generated that allow you to spot and repair pending performance problems before they cripple your database.

Ion for Oracle has true predictive analytics

Best of all, Ion has a built-in knowledgebase that explains the root cause of any performance problem and points you to supplemental information so that you thoroughly understand the reason for any slowdown.

Ion is perfect for Oracle capacity planning

Ion makes it easy to understand your database workload.  By aggregating important metrics by hour of the day and day of the week, important workload ?signatures? emerge, and these hidden trends are the keystone for a proven Oracle tuning methodology. 

Ion for Oracle shows you how your tables are accessed

Ion removes the guesswork from Oracle tuning.  You see exactly which tables are the most popular, how they are accessed, and how changes will improve your database throughput!

 
Ion for Oracle allows you to visualize hidden trends

A professional tool for the professional DBA

Ion for Oracle is not for beginners and dilettantes.  Ion is a sophisticated tool for the professional DBA, a proactive tool for successful database tuning.

Oracle is without question the most flexible and robust database ever created, and along with this complexity comes great complexity.  Along with complexity comes great power, but it?s the challenge to the DBA to manage this complexity effectively and to focus-in on the important performance metrics for their databases.

Real-time performance monitors have a serious shortcoming in that it is not easy to isolate a single performance metric in a busy database, and even harder to repair a problem while the database is experiencing an acute performance problem.

Thousands of transactions are processed every second and it?s extremely difficult to isolate and repair an Oracle performance problem.

Despite Oracle?s claims of ?automatic? database management, Oracle tuning and monitoring has become more complex than ever before.

• Do you know what your database bottleneck is?  Every database has one, you know!

• Do you know what your ?hot? tables are?

• Do you know how your table and indexes are accessed?

• Do you know when your system is doing large-table full scans?

If the answer to these questions is ?no?, then you need a window into the internals of your database.

How Ion works

The nature of performance tuning is such that it can never be fully automated.  There will always be a unstructured component to database tuning, and human intuition is an indispensible part of successful tuning.  This is what makes Ion so special.

Ion is a true decision support system, software that aids experts in diagnosing the root cause of any Oracle performance problem.  Using sophisticated logic, Ion has replicated the well-structured components of the problem domain, making it easy for the Oracle expert to get right to the heart of any Oracle performance problem. 

Ion for Oracle relieves you from the tedium of extracting the salient metrics, and puts everything that you need right at your fingertips.  Best of all, Ion?s advice is supplemented via online resources so that you get the whole story, not just bits and pieces.

Ion for Oracle adopts a proactive approach to performance tuning.  By automatic the analysis of past trends, predictive models can be generated that allow you to spot and repair pending performance problems before they cripple your database.

Ion Analyzer Tour

Let?s take a quick tour and see why Ion for Oracle can help you manage complex mission-critical databases.

When I manage dozens of production instances I don?t have the luxury of interpreting the minutiae, I need to get right to the heart of a performance problem.

Oracle?s elapsed time performance reports contain a huge amount of valuable information, but the critical details are hidden within reams of minutiae. 

So, how do we separate the wheat from the chaff? 

After choosing our start and end snapshot times, we see a detailed review of the main wait areas for the elapsed time period.  That's all there is to it!

I?ve incorporated all of my secrets into a decision support frame work so that you can quickly identify the elapsed time period that is of interest to you and see exactly what?s going on.

Here we quickly see the areas where the database is experiencing a bottleneck. 

Best of all, I?ve incorporated the expert advice with links to my online knowledgebase, so that additional details and expert advice are just a mouse-click away!

The Ion Analyzer allows you to conduct a complete post-mortem analysis on any performance problem, using proven techniques and advice from some of the world?s top Oracle tuning experts.

Ion's built-in intelligence knows how to isolate the root cause of any performance problem, and supplements his findings with expert commentary and supplemental justification.

But Analysis is just one small feature!  Ion for Oracle also allows you to spot hidden problems and drill down into the exact cause of your problem!

Continuing with our previous example, we can now take a closer look at the I/O specifics for this instance.

* go to the Database Modality

Here we see an overview of our database access methods!  In this single chart we see the total I/O for our database broken-down by type.  At a glance we can see how many tables are accessed by full-scans, index range scans and index unique scans! 

In this example, we quickly see that this database is I/O bound, and Ion tells us exactly which data files are the root cause of our contention.

But tablespace level details is not enough.  Fear not!  We can drill down into even more detail and see counts of all tables that experienced full-scans during the period:

Here we see that the xxx table may have unnecessary large-table full-table scans, signs of a missing index.  All we do is click on the table name and Viola, we see the SQL against that table for the time period!

Now a quick review of the WHERE clause for these SQL's shows us exactly whihc index is missing!  A complete soup-to-nuts analysis, in just a few seconds!

Find Oracle database signatures

Almost all Oracle databases have repeating patterns of usage, trends that form the ?signature for the database.  You may see trends of day-of-the-week or hour-of-the-day.  Oracle automated tools are reactive; they wait until the database is experiencing a problem before they react by reallocating resources.  What we need is a true proactive tool, one that analyzes the past and predicts the future.

George Santayana one said ?Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it?, and Winston Churchill took this idea one step further when he said ?The farther that you can look into the past, the farther you can see into the Future?.  This is especially true for Oracle database management!

Almost every database has repeating patterns of usage and these signatures provide exceptional insights into the characteristics of your workloads.

Once you understand these trends you can schedule just-in-time configuration changes that fix an Oracle issue before it cripples your database.

Here we see a common scenario, a typical OLTP database with a bi-modal workload.  During office hours, the database has short online transactions, but in the evening, large batch jobs create a vastly different workload.

By knowing when the change in workloads occur, we can adjust Oracle by opening-up the PGA so that batch jobs can acquire more resources than the default value of 5%, a governor that protects an online task from hogging too many resources.

Oracle Forecasting tour

All real-time performance monitors suffer from many shortcomings, foremost being the inability to fix an acute issue without bouncing the database.  If you want to be effective in tuning, a holistic approach is necessary.

By analyzing hidden trends and processing signatures you can create a self-tuning Oracle database that is truly proactive!  Imagine!  By analyzing repeating changes in your workload you can anticipate changes and fix Oracle just-in-time, preventing problems before they occur!

But don?t take our word for it!  Let?s hear from some real-world working DBA?s:

Troubleshooting an Oracle performance problem is time consuming, and of you are like me, managing dozens of instances can leave you short-handed and exasperated.

With Ion for Oracle, finding an Oracle performance problem is so easy that I can do it with one hand!  Try Ion and y?all will see Oracle run like forty going north.

Ion is not suitable for beginners!  It?s an industrial-strength tool designed exclusively for experienced DBA?s.