Performance tuning is all about time. You measure the time it takes for a certain process to complete, and then you search for ways to reduce this time to improve end-users experience and/or increase the application productivity. But minimizing time is not enough — it’s important to minimize the correct time metric. A typical mistake in database performance optimization to optimize DB time instead of the duration experienced by the end user. If this happens, this can easily result in a situation when DB time is reduced significantly, but the process is still taking almost as long as before, the SLA is still breached, bosses and users are increasingly frustrated.
In this post, I will give two real-life examples of cases when the difference between DB time and elapsed time was the key to understanding the problem.
Oracle Diagnostician 