Hi All,
In order to give our customers some educated advise concerning buying a database server I'm looking for ways to measure the load of a database server.
- Does anybody have suggestions how to obtain this information (OEM is a bit expensive), would VST give all the information I need?
- What would you use as KPI? (bytes read, written & number of tranctions?)
Any help and/or advise would be appreciated.
Bronco
I'd checkout www.dbappraise.com for a comprehensive suite. They also do have an online demo available.
ProTop, which you can get from dbAppraise as Mike suggests, will give you free tool that can give you lots of numbers. Picking the right numbers and making sense of them is a little more complicated. Interpreting them for sizing recommendations is more complex still.
In particular, it is not uncommon for people to be looking for new iron because they are dissatisfied with the performance of the existing iron, perhaps because user or transaction volume has increased. But, there is always the question in those cases of whether the iron is actually at fault or if the real problem is that the system needs tuning ... which a new box won't fix. Put a fast enough box under the application and it may improve things, but potentially less so than merely tuning the system correctly in the first place and correcting any problem code which may be contributing to that problem.
Hint: If this is the case, the URL Mike gave you is still a good place to get help.
Of course, if the new box is simply because the system is old, tired, threatening to die, and expensive to support, then it can be very happy because iron has gotten dramatically cheaper and it is not uncommon, especially for small to medium sites, to be able to replace an old system with a new one that has massively more disk, more memory, costs less, has very low maintenance, and even occupies a fraction of the space.
Thanks Mike & Thomas for you usefull answers.
Sorry for responding so late.