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Anyone utilize this product to it's fullest extent? Do you see the value?

We do not have a DBA on staff but we do own this tool. I opened up a support ticket but they stated they could not assist in actually using it so I'm curious on suggestions on how to use DPA to find why a sql environment is having performance issues and sql timeouts. The boss man is asking why are we paying for it if no one know how to use it?

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tony.fountain

Using the tool is pretty self explanatory once you get into the interface. Mind, you should have some level of expertise in performance tuning as that knowledge can be leveraged in this tool. The tool also has videos available when you first navigate to pages you haven't visited before. I think you can also reset that so they videos display for you again. The boss man should be asking, why is no one learning how to use this tool! There are also many resources on the SW website.

cfizz34

Guess I am looking for something that say hey, look here...this is the problem and fix this. I see all the metrics and its a wealth of info but with my 100 other responsibilities I have not had time to RTFM on this one as well. Does anyone know of a 3rd party vendor that offers a service that has the time to correlate issues when looking at 15 different orion modules?

tony.fountain

As far as DPA is concerned, it puts all that information right in front of you. Simply put, look at the largest bars first, tune, rinse and repeat. Performance tuning is a cyclic process and is much like peeling away layers of an onion. You get the first few, implement those changes, and reevaluate. Grab the next several queries that are bad, and repeat.

cpriddy

I'd start off looking at a few of the free how-to videos (especially the How to navigate the DPA interface to diagnose performance problems. Then look for other DPA training videos and documentation at the DPA Success Center.

Plus there are tons of both general and specific questions and answers in this Database Performance Analyzer Thwack area that you can search for.

mesverrum

The thing about DPA is if you don't even have a DBA on staff then presumably there is nobody around who knows anything about the inner workings of the database to do the tuning cycles. So from a server admin perspective there is very little to "fix". No DBA, or at least a pseudo-DBA, means you probably aren't running things like SQL HA clusters with their various requirements and are just monitoring databases full of off the shelf vendor managed software. Pretty unlikely that someone in that scenario is going to be adding covering indexes or modifying the application code itself to optimize, all they can do is try to give the server enough CPU/RAM/decent storage, and hope for the best. They just most often need SQL server up/down and maybe some error logs, which is pretty easily covered in SAM. DPA really shines for people who know how to read it, but if a company doesn't even have someone on staff who knows how to interpret the data from DPA then it might just be too specific of a tool for their use case.

A construction framing crew doesn't have any need for wood jointer, but a furniture maker wouldn't get far at all without one.