In today's competitive environment, customers are insisting that their third-party Oracle system be pre-tuned and ready-to-use. Major ERP vendors (SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle Applications) have long recognized their responsibility to provide Oracle support and go to great lengths to ensure that their software runs efficiently for Oracle.

Sadly, thousands of customers must struggle with optimizing and tuning a vendor system that you did not write, and cannot change.  This is especially true for vendors of departmental applications that are growing their client base and moving from small simple databases (MySQL, SQL Server) to a robust database such as Oracle.

Protect your Reputation

These issues have led to expensive litigation and ruined the reputations of otherwise responsible application vendors.  It is considered the vendor's responsibility to provide Oracle installation configuration and optimization instructions and to ensure that their SQL has been optimized for the Oracle cost-based SQL optimizer.

From small departmental application to giant ERP packages, customers are now asserting their right to be provided with reliable documentation for the proper configuration & management for Oracle-based vendor systems.

The most problematic issues are with vendors who fail to provide instructions for optimizing their SQL statements.  No information is provided about the proper optimizer_mode, and their SQL execution plans are not stabilized with hints or stored outlines.  The unsuspecting customer is then left with the formidable task of tuning SQL that they did not write and  are not responsible for tuning.  This can result in tens of thousands of dollars in unnecessary expenses.

These vendor oversights have become such a great problem that Mike Ault, (noted Remote DBA expert) has written the book Tuning Third-party Vendor Oracle Systems: Tuning when you can't touch the code:

http://www.rampant-books.com/ebook_vendor_tune.htm
 

Solving the Problem

Remember, it is not the responsibility of your customer to hire expensive consultants to configure and tune your package for Oracle and customers are asserting their right to be provided with complete and accurate Oracle configuration and management instructions:

1 - Server Configuration Guide

• Required OS versions and patch levels
• Kernel parameter adjustments (registry settings for Windows)
• Disk configuration options (supported RAID levels)
• Disk load balancing requirements (preventing disk I/O bottlenecks)
• File standards for Oracle server files (names, locations, permissions)
• RAM swap configuration
• Server troubleshooting guide

2 - Configuration guide for Oracle

• Required version and patch levels
• Recommended init.ora settings
• Non-default object settings (PCTFREE, PCTUSED, FREELISTS)
• Tablespace options (locally-managed tablespaces, bitmap freelists)
• Configuration of rollback segments (undo logs) online redo logs and archived redo logs
• Recommended backup & recovery strategy
• List of key tables and indexes
• Partitioning and tablespace segregation strategy
• Sample tnsnames.ora, sqlnet.ora and listener.ora files
• Statistics generation requirements (dbms_stats parameters, histogram columns)
• Failover (continuous availability) strategy

3 - Management Guide

• Procedures for addressing trace and dump file errors
• Procedures for reporting application code errors
• Escalation procedures (when to call vendor vs. calling Oracle Technical Support)
• Monitoring requirements and recommended tools

4- Tuning & Troubleshooting Guide

• List of critical Oracle metrics to monitor and their root cause
• Troubleshooting techniques
• Early Warning techniques

Burleson Vendor Documentation Service

In order to ensure customer Goodwill and satisfaction, hundreds third-party Oracle vendors are seeking Oracle experts to write complete Oracle documentation for their applications. There is no excuse for your customers to suffer from poor performance and reliability.

Burleson Remote Remote DBA Oracle support staff has the highest standard in the Remote Oracle support industry, and all remote Oracle Remote DBA consultants are Oracle Certified Professionals with extensive real-world experience and impressive credentials.

BEI Remote Remote DBA retains many or the world's leading Oracle configuration and tuning experts and provides reasonably-priced Oracle documentation.  Because we do it for a living, BEI Remote Remote DBA staff can quickly and reliably create documentation that will ensure fast and reliable performance of your Oracle application.