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donoreo
Premium Member
join:2002-05-30
North York, ON

donoreo

Premium Member

Vendor support

We have a warehouse management application from one of the largest vendors in the business. There is a custom application that we have had since go live to upload routing (logisitics - trucks) information from another application.

For the past few months (Sept) this has been slow to process. It turns out it has always been slow but a change in operations has brought it to light. They have given us one software update and made a change to a temporary table in the database (it had no index but does now). This has not solved the problem. Logging is not great for this being a custom application so we have had to manually coordinate with the people using it and then manually monitor the progress. This week I have been watching the uploads and logging start and finish times and how it is working (ie processes 1000 records in a minute but takes another 15 to do the last 100 records). I am doing this for 4 or so hours per day and not able to do much else during this time.

I told them on Monday that I was doing this when they said they were going to send us another software update to enhance the logging. Today I get an email saying we need to turn on the high logs and here is how to do it. WTF?!? Months later they tell us that it HAS high logging? I gave a polite reply and voiced my disappointment at this and how we have spent so many hours working on it. Rest assured people higher up are going to raise shit about it.

Seriously....

IIIBradIII
Comm M-E-L Instr
join:2000-09-28
Greer, SC

IIIBradIII

Member

I am constantly amazed at some of the specialized software out there that is badly written, badly supported, yet ridiculously expensive and apparently in demand. Whoever thought to write and sell some of these was a genius - and likely richly enjoying the fruits of their labor.

donoreo
Premium Member
join:2002-05-30
North York, ON

donoreo

Premium Member

They came back and said they did not want to do high logging as it could hurt performance worse. I replied that it would be ok if we got the data needed and by not suggesting it to now it gives the appearance that they are not making an effort.

guppy_fish
Premium Member
join:2003-12-09
Palm Harbor, FL

guppy_fish to donoreo

Premium Member

to donoreo
Enterprise level database systems are very dependent on the dataset size, number of records, its very likely that this started out fine and as the database has grown, the performance is dropping exponentially, its a full time job for a dba to do nothing but monitor an application/database and then have to rework the tables, tuples, keys ect.

It sounds as if your company bought something , maybe even sold without the knowledge and db system needs full time support.

Its also possible that its hardware limits the program has run into as the database grew. Again, this is a dba's job to be the expert and find the solutions, its very common and some of the most highly sought after professionals that can use the db tools to see where resources are being consumed.

You may not be happy, but its definitely not unexpected.

My guess is your memory and caching are no longer adequate for the size of datasets being processed. db's can chew up huge amount of ram and when things have to access disk, everything comes to a crawl.

Also, if your in a VM environment or server that is doing other services this can have near lethal effect on performance

donoreo
Premium Member
join:2002-05-30
North York, ON

donoreo

Premium Member

said by guppy_fish:

Enterprise level database systems are very dependent on the dataset size, number of records, its very likely that this started out fine and as the database has grown, the performance is dropping exponentially, its a full time job for a dba to do nothing but monitor an application/database and then have to rework the tables, tuples, keys ect.

It sounds as if your company bought something , maybe even sold without the knowledge and db system needs full time support.

Its also possible that its hardware limits the program has run into as the database grew. Again, this is a dba's job to be the expert and find the solutions, its very common and some of the most highly sought after professionals that can use the db tools to see where resources are being consumed.

You may not be happy, but its definitely not unexpected.

My guess is your memory and caching are no longer adequate for the size of datasets being processed. db's can chew up huge amount of ram and when things have to access disk, everything comes to a crawl.

Also, if your in a VM environment or server that is doing other services this can have near lethal effect on performance

That all makes sense..except that it is not the topic. My problem is that our support contact did not actually investigate the problem far enough to know that the custom program even had high logging. I used to be on the other side at one of their competitors on the support side. I would have checked the custom program specs if I did not know, he did not.

Now, as to your scenario, yes, that all makes sense, except I know it is not the case. I know for several reasons, we purge old data so we always have about the same amount. We recently did a reorg and reindex on the DB tables, it was the same after as before. We also have another warehouse on different hardware, DB, etc, that is not as busy and has less data. The performance is the same. They do not have a problem with this because they operate differently and in a different time zone so the routing info comes in long before they need it. The problem is something in how they go about this internally to the system.