Third-party Oracle Tuning Software Has their time finally come? Don Burleson

When I tune Oracle, I like plain use SQL*Plus scripts, and I sometimes wonder if any vendor will design a GUI that makes sense to the DBA.  Tuning Oracle is all-about locating and fixing bottlenecks, and most DBA's pull-out their native scripts rather then try to navigate their way through a convoluted Oracle tuning software interface.  

BC's most recent Oracle tuning software is Ion for Oracle, a truly proactive Oracle tuning software tool that gets right to the heart of any Oracle performance problem.  Ion for Oracle uses STATSPACK or AWR to analyze for hidden trends and signatures, making it a smart choice in Oracle tuning software.

Click "Play" to take the tour or visit

www.Ion-DBA.com

I'm always skeptical of any GUI tool that claims to assist me when tuning, usually because the tool doesn't give me what I want to see.  I recently investigated a new offering called DBFlash that surprised me. 

I love the ASH cluster and the ability to perform time-series tuning, but ASH is an extra-cost Oracle tuning software feature.

The proliferation of 3^rd-party tools to compete with OEM speaks for itself, but I needed a time-series tool that would allow me to do advanced trending and predictive analysis. 

Personally, I like plain-old dictionary scripts and trending analysis tools.  Here are a few of my BC Oracle tuning software packages:

• Excel-DB - A great tool for quickly extracting Oracle performance data into Excel spreadsheets.

• Ion - The Ion tool is the only Oracle tuning software outside of OEM that will plot time-series data from AWR and ASH. It is move advanced than OEM because it allows you to view Oracle trends by day-of-the-week and hour-of-the-day. 

• Oracle Script Collection  - I still rely on my trusty script collection to help me see what's happening inside Oracle, and this one has over 600 ready-to-run Oracle scripts.