When we first decided to get MaxGauge, our expectation from the MaxGauge is to find out how we can tune our database better. Also we wanted to learn more about the tuning skills, and we wanted to know how we can use a tool to analyze performance.

We have currently in our department 24 databases running. And one of which is a financial database. There are more than 500 reports running on against this database, and data just keeps growing and the users are complaining that the reports are running slower and slower. So with the Maxgauge we wanted to find out what’s going on, and with the help of EXEM engineer we were able to find out that there are high level of parallelism set on the database. So with the help of EXEM engineers we were able to fix that the overall CPU usage has gone down about 20% which is a big improvement on the database. And we noticed some of the reports took more than several days to complete is for now running around 5 to 6 hours.

One of the benefits of having MaxGauge is being able to see the historical data. For example, we has some incidents where the developer deploys their application to production without telling the DBAs and we realize that with the historical data we could easily find out if there are any abnormal queries running against the data and we could easily identify problems with the historical data provided through the MaxGauge. Also with the historical data we are able to troubleshoot any problem that happened during the off hours because at any given time we can easily find out what queries were running.

Our main concern with the MaxGauge was the overheads, because we had few incidence where we use other database tools such as Toad to monitor data queries, and often we realize that other tools take a lot of CPU on the servers, so we have to turn it off whereas MaxGauge only took 1% of CPU resources. So it is very light weight we never had any problem because of the Maxgauge running on the server.