Before I dive into this blog post, quick heads up for anyone attending UKOUG: on Tuesday only, I’ll be hanging out with some very smart people from the IOUG RAC Special Interest Group in the “gallery” above the exhibition hall. We’re ready to help anyone run a RAC cluster in a virtual environment on their own laptop. And if your laptop doesn’t meet the minimum requirements then you can try with one of our demo workstations. Come find us!!
Why Make Charts
I’ve heard Kyle Hailey speak on a few different occasions, and more than once he’s talked about the power of visualizing data. (In fact Kyle was a key person behind Grid Control’s performance screens.)
I couldn’t agree more. I regularly visualize data when I’m working. Two reasons come immediately to mind:
- It helps me to better understand what’s happening. There have been times when I’ve had an “aha” moment very quickly after seeing the picture.
- It helps others more easily understand what i’m trying to communicate. It’s great for management reports and such – not because it’s fluff, but because it’s a good communication tool.
Last week, I made a few quick charts as illustrations for a performance report. The process really isn’t that complicated, but I thought I’d put the steps into a blog post… for myself to reference in the future and for anyone else who might find this helpful. :)
Making Simple Charts
This demonstration will use data from the AWR to build graphs. Note that if you run these queries, Oracle legally requires you to purchase the extra-cost “diagnostic pack” license. But similar queries could be written from free statspack or S-ASH tables.
You need multiple data points to make a graph. For this demo, The AWR was configured to take snapshotsd every 30 minutes and I’m looking at a query which ran for about 10 hours. Also, it was the only query running in the instance for most of that time – so I will also look at some instance-wide statistics.
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