RE: Hands-free Administration

I would like to reinforce Art's comments. I am responsible for a large number of sites which have run without any administration intervention for more than 3 years. All I do is to regularly monitor the sites for disk usage and performance and where necessary intervene to add more disk, or to persuade the users to do some sensible housekeeping on large history tables. The sites that give me the most grief are the ones which are constantly tinkering with the application software. I would like to point out that hands-free administration should not be assumed for all applications or for all databases. If the database and application are designed to be disciplined and do routine housekeeping then it is still necessary to monitor the system performance. Multi-user systems have a performance "knee" and can degrade quite quickly once that point is reached. For example, take the query optimiser. It will change from indexed access to sequential - or vice versa, depending on data volumes. And that may or may not have an ongoing effect on other system performance indicators. So, yes you can do hands-free, but please don't assume that means that you do not need to monitor. Regards Malcolm -----Original Message----- From: informix-list-bounces@iiug.org [mailto:informix-list-bounces@iiug.org] On Behalf Of Art S. Kagel (Oninit LLC) Sent: 04 February 2008 12:48 To: Chris Youll Cc: informix-list@iiug.org Subject: Re: Hands-free Administration Chris Youll wrote: > I have been trying to follow the resurgence of Informix IDS and the new > cheetah product line. In the "Chat with the Labs" presentations and the > IBM Web site a great deal is referenced about the ease of management. I > believe, I read or heard something about installing IDS and never have to > worry about it, it just runs. I don't think any database company would > come out and say their product requires more DBA's than anyone else. So, > is it the complexity of the environment that the RDBMS is in or is it the > RDBMS product that actually makes the product hands-free administration? > > Any specifics on what makes IDS hands-free would be useful. > Hi Chris, Once an IDS instance is tuned to one's operating environment it is not unusual to be able to just 'let it run'. Clearly changes in the business environment that the server is supporting will occasionally require the engine to be retuned or for a table to be reorganized, periodic large operations like deleting large blocks of historical records may cause one to want to rebuild an index for efficiency immediately rather than let the page scanners reorganize it over time. So, the real operator guiding how hands free any IDS instance is will be the dynamism of the environment that it has to support, but that will effect any database server one would use. The difference for IDS is that at any level of required support, the amount of effort and time required of the DBAs or other administrators is normally far less than for other competing products. There are literally hundreds of Informix instances out there that haven't been touched by human hands for years at a time. There are shops that have run for years without even knowing they have an Informix database server. Art S. Kagel Oninit > Thanks, > Chris > ============================================================================ =============== Please access the attached hyperlink for an important electronic communications disclaimer: http://www.oninit.com/home/disclaimer.php ============================================================================ =============== _______________________________________________ Informix-list mailing list Informix-list@iiug.org http://www.iiug.org/mailman/listinfo/informix-list