While there are many database tuning tools on the market, some are better than others.  Ignite is built on the application of performance intelligence and advanced wait-time analysis techniques.  I know their management personally (Don Bergal, Harvard MBA), and I have the greatest respect for their All-American experts who created the Confio tool.  Great people make great tools, so let's take a quick tour of the Confio Ignite product and see how it stacks up as a tool for the Oracle DBA and developer.

The Confio Ignite tool uses the concept of "performance intelligence" a marketing term that describes the use of proven statistical techniques and regression analysis to isolate important performance trends.  The "intelligence" component is the capturing of the intuition of a human DBA expert, a common practice for intelligent software that manages the well-structured components of the decision making processes.

The overall goal of Confio Ignite is to identify the "most important" performance problems divine their root causes. Like all Oracle tuning tools, it is impossible to completely automate the intuition of a human tuning expert, and Ignite requires in-depth DBA knowledge, a sophisticated tool for a sophisticated DBA.

Historical performance analysis

Confio has a sophisticated visual interface and does trend analysis to analyze SQL statements over time.    The old adage "Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it" is relevant here, and it's only a matter of time before the scientists at Oracle develop a predictive model that will analyze historical patterns and "proactively" change the database BEFORE the problem occurs.

Identifying workload characteristics is critical to predictive modeling, and that almost all systems will have repeating signatures for each workload.  Oracle started to make a commitment to workload-based analysis with the introduction of STATSPACK in Oracle 8i, and we see even more exciting workload analysis features in Oracle 11g, with the SQL performance Analyzer, a tool that allows you to capture a representative Oracle workload from AWR and test it under different configurations.

The fundamentals of proactive tuning are predicated on Oracle workload analysis and it's very clear that holistic tuning is the best way to achieve the most efficient allocation of system resources (disk, RAM, CPU). However, we must be cautions in time-series modeling since the farther we go into the future, the larger the confidence interval.  This spells doom for long-term forecasting of important tuning metrics.

The "trumpet of doom" underscores the importance of understanding statistically valid regression techniques

According to John Beresniewicz of Oracle Corporation, the metric baselines (first introduced in 10gR2) ?characterize? specific system metrics over time periods, and these time periods can be matched to system usage patterns.

These statistical 'signatures? (dubbed ?profiles? by Oracle), are used to implement adaptive alert thresholds that can signal the DBA when a statistically significant event occurs. Within Confio Ignite we see a similar approach, analysis of historical time-series data using statistically valid techniques and applied performance intelligence.  Below we see profiles of the performance of specific SQL statements over time:

Confio Ignite SQL trend analysis histogram

It's been long established that a proactive tuning approach is best for overall instance tuning, and Confio Ignite appears to be using valid techniques, seeking exceptions (anomalies from the average) and time-series trend reports to identify database bottlenecks and suggest root cause fixes.

Confio Ignite also supports RAC clusters, allowing a single console for RAC tuning.

Confio Ignite RAC screen

While RAC databases have many instances, each with their own instance to rune, Ignite brings together the total waits, allowing the tuning expert to analyze the trends over time.

A pragmatic approach

The Confio Ignite product marketing claims that Ignite has a practical application, answering common performance questions:

DBA Performance Questions;

● How often does a particular SQL execute?
● When was it slow before?
● Is it always slow for the same reasons?
● What other SQLs are running when it's slow?

Developer Performance Questions;

● What recent code changes are performing poorly in the test environment and should not be promoted to the production environment?
● Are there SQLs running at times I did not know they were going to run?
● Whose code is causing the problem?

Management Performance Questions;

● Which user communities are being affected by database bottlenecks?
● Have system changes impacted key customers?
● Has the DBA team demonstrably improved application service this month?
● Am I in danger of violating a Service Level Agreement?

One common mistake by tuning neophytes is tuning SQL statements which are not executed frequently enough to have an impact on overall system performance.  Ignite overcomes this issue by identifying the most resource intensive SQL.

Confio Ignite Top SQL causing user waits

By isolating the "top" SQL statements over times (something that is not immediately available in STATSPACK or AWR), the end-user can drill-down into their most expensive SQL, gathering the  low-hanging fruit for maximum overall per4formance improvements.

Ignite also monitors web server performance, allowing the end-user to display the source components of waits for a web application.

Confio Ignite - Web application waits by day

In sum, Ignite is a very useful tool for the senior DBA, supplementing their knowledge with an easy to use front-end that relieved the tedium of data collection and automates the well-structured components of the tuning process.

---

These pages also mention the Confio solution:

 

---