Data Warehouse Performance Tuning

1. The first step is to identify the root causes of the problem. The IT team may claim that the reporting software does not work well due to the complexity of the database schema, while the business users may claim that even simple reports take forever to run. Regardless of what both groups say, you must gather hard-data so that the real issues reveal themselves. The first question you must ask the IT team is: are you capturing DW usage statistics? If usage statistics are not available, skip to the next step. If usage is being tracked, you should be able to answer the following questions:
1. Who are the top report users?
2. Who are the top report creators?
3. Which users generate the most errors?
4. What are the most common errors?
5. What are the most popular reports?
6. Which reports take the longest to run?
7. Which database tables are used most frequently?
8. What is the row count of the most frequently used tables?
9. What table columns are used the most?

This entry was posted on Friday, February 24th, 2006 at 10:22 am and is filed under Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.