Web administrators, DBAs, and application developers
require a variety of information to determine how to optimize reporting
environments. Resource Analyzer offers decision support analysis,
which helps administrators decide how to organize their sites by supplying
useful facts about the following types of issues:
- Monitoring and managing
the impact of Web-based reporting on Online Transaction Processing
(OLTP) operational systems.
- Balancing decision
support systems (DSS) reporting with OLTP workload to allow the
two to coexist and to ward off threats posed by reporting on OLTP
data.
- Determining
if data-access design meets the needs of users.
- Removing resource-consuming
data that is never used (dormant data).
- Determining the best
times to schedule maintenance, backups, data-warehouse extractions,
and batch processes.
- Determining an allowable
amount of downtime.
- Deciding how
fast users must be able to recover from software failure or disk
drive crashes.
- Discovering performance
"hot spots" that must be targeted for correction before they become
major problems.
- Analyzing how mixed
workloads pattern themselves and change over time (trend analysis).
- Determining how to
educate the user community on efficient request writing, overnight
batch processing, report bursting, and other areas, in order to
avoid performance problems.
- Deciding how
the organization can quantify return on investments for new data-warehouse
and intranet data-dissemination initiatives and justifying these
expenses to management.
- Uncovering the revenue-generating
potential in Web-based data. This information can then be sold to
partners, customers, or external market researchers.
- Considering if and
when the enterprise should decide to charge back the users of data.
These issues are discussed in greater detail throughout this
chapter.