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Full throttle
Sluggish data warehouse? Teradata Performance and Capacity Planning Services may provide the tune-up your company needs.
by C. C. Williams
Like high-performance race cars on the track, swiftly growing businesses depend
on the engine of operations—the enterprise data warehouse (EDW)—to operate at peak efficiency. Companies that push their data warehouse technology by introducing more operations, mixed workloads, expanding data volumes and new business processes don't
want to face nasty surprises. As enterprise data warehouses evolve into active data warehouses that support both operational and strategic decisions, they become mission-critical, making it even more crucial to accurately monitor and optimize operations.
Data warehouse teams are realizing the benefits of adopting established performance management practices in order to answer critical questions such as: How do they accurately measure performance? Is their database up to snuff? And, most important of all, how
do they keep it running at its best?
Teradata's Performance Management and Capacity Planning Services provide compelling answers. Teradata consultants help companies disseminate enterprise intelligence to a variety of users in a reliable and timely fashion, and establish performance management practices that can change to meet user expectations
and service level agreements (SLAs). Teradata offers a well-defined process designed to assess performance management practices, analyze performance trends, identify bottlenecks and facilitate the necessary changes.
Tune-up time
If you're considering performance management services, you're probably contending
with a growing deluge of data. Data volume, however, is just one of several growing pains you must face when trying to get an active data warehouse to perform at peak efficiency. Data freshness may also be a challenge. With the proper tools and training, though, you can surmount these problems. After working
with the Teradata consultants, a retailer that previously loaded data into its data mart once
a week can now load point-of-sale (POS) transaction data into its active data warehouse almost immediately.
Of course, data isn't very useful if you can't run queries on it, and with queries come a host of issues. Often, data warehouses must be able
to run hundreds of thousands of queries simultaneously. The complexity of those queries grows with the development of increasingly sophisticated business intelligence (BI) tools. Meanwhile, system users, a growing number of them every day, all expect to have the freedom
to query the database at any time.
As if this weren't enough, there's the challenge of mixed workloads—long or short queries, queries with fast response requirements and processing of detailed analytical queries that deliver information across the company. The data warehouse needs to satisfy the demands
of marketing, advertising, finance, operations, customer service, customers and partners, and do so in the right timeframe and with the right prioritization. "You have to make sure that your high-priority work won't be overburdened by the slow guys on the system," explains Paul Davies, a senior database consultant with
the Teradata Professional Services group.
Satisfying these conflicting performance management demands is normally straight-forward for most powerful active data warehouses. As the business grows, however, the demands grow, and as the demands grow, so
do the questions: Why is the system running slowly? Can it handle another application or two? Who's using the system the most and why? When will we run out of capacity?
Left unattended, conflicting demands can mushroom into system-clogging problems.
To ensure that your data warehouse meets new performance management drivers and maximizes capacity, you can turn to Teradata Professional Services for guidance.
Turbo-charging your system
Teradata's Services team offers a comprehensive program that provides best-practices consulting in areas such as system and application performance, workload management and capacity planning. The program also offers a customized performance-management scorecard and a unique performance-reporting database.
Teradata's holistic approach to performance management consists of an evaluation of customer processes, implementation of recommended performance enhancements, mentoring of customer staff, and follow-up
to ensure that customers are utilizing the
latest performance features and techniques.
The process begins with an assessment of existing performance-management practices and comparison to Teradata's best practices in
five areas:
 | performance-data collection |
| system performance |
| application performance |
| workload management |
| capacity planning
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The Teradata team documents the results in a management scorecard, one
of the two unique tools offered by Teradata. The other tool is a performance-reporting database. Fitted with an Excel user interface, the program collects data from the Teradata Warehouse, assessing more than 100 performance metrics and calculating more than 30 pivot reports that measure daily uses, query-response times and other historical and current data. Teradata consultants work with your data warehouse team when interpreting the reports and making recommendations. They also customize the tools for each case
and train the staff to continue their own performance-management procedures.
The assessment and scorecard determine
the scope of the engagement, indicating which services—workload management, application performance or capacity planning—stand to benefit the most from optimization and should get priority. The data-collection database is at the core of this analysis process. Data collection typically requires two weeks of consulting, plus nightly loading and purging of scripts, to analyze fresh data while using 30 graphic macros.
The application-performance service can optimize applications and queries, improve
performance and return capacity to the system so that it can handle more work. The service benefits customers who are running out of horsepower on existing hardware. It also assists customers who are upgrading, leveraging new features or adding new applications.
Boosting application performance is a top priority for companies moving into an active data warehousing environment. The work-load management service balances processing resources to yield consistent application performance. The engagement typically requires two to four weeks of consulting, which includes analysis of query traffic, volumes and categories.
Query management is a key aspect of performance enhancement. As an analogy, consider
the freeway during rush hour. "You need to put high-speed cars [queries] in the fast lane," says Davies. "You don't want them behind a truck in the slow lane." At a recent customer engagement, Davies was able to "unclog the fast lane" by installing additional indices in the customer database, allowing it to run more queries per second, speeding up the running time for 12 reports by 90%.
High-octane performance
One of the challenges facing IT managers is determining when to invest in new hardware and software—another way Teradata's Performance Management and Capacity Planning Services can help. Consultants provide the customer with the ability to properly budget for future capacity expansions by accurately forecasting the impact of adding new applications to the system. "Customers don't want to buy more hardware until they're effectively using what they have," says Donna Becker, senior data warehouse consultant, Professional Services Americas at Teradata.
A capacity-planning service engagement typically takes four weeks and requires, among other things, at least 30 days worth of data collection for query counts. By analyzing CPU and disk consumption, this service helps you model a growth plan and budget for upgrades before they're needed. Instruction in best practices ensures a continuously effective approach to future performance and capacity planning.
Teradata's Performance Management and Capacity Planning Services benefit customers at all levels. If you're new, it helps you get started on the right foot. If you've got an established system, it helps ensure you're getting optimal capacity out of your existing systems. If you've pushed your system to the limit and it's time to upgrade, the consultants can help ensure you're using features and functionality to their fullest extent.
A tune-up with Teradata's Performance Management and Capacity Planning Services ensures that the engine of your IT infrastructure—the active data warehouse—runs lean
and fast, powering your enterprise success.
Learn more about how Performance and Capacity Services can turbocharge your Teradata system.
T
C. C. Williams has written business and technology articles for more than 20 years.
Teradata on the road |
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Paul Davies, senior database consultant, Teradata
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Randy Pulley, senior database consultant, Teradata
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Randy Pulley and Paul Davies, senior database consultants for Teradata, love
what they do. Hot demand for Teradata's Performance Management and Capacity Planning Services has the consultants, and many others from the Professional Services group, crisscrossing the country. Every week, they present the program to Teradata customers, implement the customized performance-management scorecard and performance-reporting database, mentor customers on the use of the tools and conduct follow-up visits. Most of their service engagements last about two weeks, and they're on the road up to 80% of the year.
Pulley and Davies are the main designers of the performance database at the core of the service, which helps customers optimize their data warehouse systems. "The demand and results have been outstanding," says Davies of the program. A five-year member of the Professional Services group and 25-year Teradata veteran, Davies makes two or three presentations a week.
While it's sometimes a challenge to
get some clients to try a new approach, Pulley acknowledges, they typically follow through with Teradata's recommendations and are rewarded with success.
During one presentation, Pulley, a three-year Teradata veteran and an expert in system architectural design, was asked to devise solutions for a large hospital management firm's performance-management problems. Pulley delivered, creating a prototype performance database the customer still uses today, three years after the initial meeting.
Subsequently, Pulley and Davies spent six months developing a predictive performance program for a large financial institution, installing the first official version of their data-collection database. That, explains Pulley, has evolved into the current performance management service.
What's driving demand for Teradata's performance management system? Its holistic approach, says Pulley, citing Teradata's suite of services: workload management, application performance and capacity planning. "It has a wide scope but at the same time we want it to be very flexible." —C.C.W.
Learn more about how Performance and Capacity Services can turbocharge your Teradata system. |
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© Teradata Magazine-June 2006
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