Finding & Fixing Performance Problems in a Complex Application & Database System

By: Calvin Tang

Abstract: Alarm SMS messages and emails are being sent by the performance monitoring system to the production DBA team and the development team alerting everyone that the latest release of a critical business application and the underlying databases are grinding to a halt. The developers, QA team, and DBAs all point fingers at each other. The developers say "My code is perfect. It passed all of the unit, system and load tests". The QA team says "we tested and certified the code, the SQL, and the database". The DBAs say “the production servers are configured according to the specifications and have all of the latest updates.” Has this ever happened to you?