Performance Tuning for Oracle EBS

Oracle Enterprise Business Suite (EBS) is a powerful, robust suite of applications that helps thousands of enterprise customers improve their business processes. But no matter how well you think you set up EBS at the outset, it needs to undergo performance tuning on a regular basis to make sure that it’s still operating at peak efficiency.

Just like brushing your teeth helps stave off long-term issues like cavities, doing performance tuning for Oracle EBS is a best practice for your enterprise IT that decreases the likelihood of crashes and instability.

Oracle EBS performance tuning should be both proactive and reactive:

• Proactive performance tuning is done in advance (e.g. during the planning and implementation phases of a new project) to establish a baseline for performance.
• Reactive performance tuning is done in response to a perceived acute problem in order to efficiently resolve the issue.

For best results, Oracle EBS performance tuning should be an iterative, ongoing process that helps resolve performance issues as they crop up, identifying and fixing root causes more quickly. Below, we’ll discuss some concerns of performance tuning as it pertains to your Oracle EBS deployment.

4 Essential Components of Performance Tuning

Underneath the umbrella of “performance tuning” are a number of separate but related activities.

The different components of performance tuning include:

• Performance analysis, collecting data about server and client speeds and response times, which can then be used to identify bottlenecks and targets for optimization.
• Code optimization, rewriting and refactoring an application’s code base in order to improve its speed, scalability and availability.
• Load balancing, distributing requests across multiple servers and systems during times of peak usage to avoid crashes and performance issues.
• Parameter tuning, making changes to application settings and configurations as necessary to adjust to your evolving IT environment.

Performance Tuning for Your Oracle EBS Deployment

Once you get started with performance tuning in Oracle EBS, the difference can be drastic. In many cases, just a few adjustments can make a major difference for your Oracle EBS performance. When doing reactive performance tuning in response to an existing problem, time is of the essence.

Below are the steps to follow to isolate and resolve an Oracle EBS performance issue:

• Clearly define the problem: What is the application or service that is experiencing an issue? Who experienced the issue and at what time(s)? Can you repeat the issue? How does the issue impact the organization as a whole?
• Gather data: Collect as much performance data, statistics, and logs as possible, which may contain hints or explicit statements of the underlying problem. This may include SQL queries, database statistics, operating system logs, etc.
• Identify the root cause: Work to identify the most fundamental issue, following the chain of causes and effects to its source. If a process is slow, for example, which parts of the process are the bottleneck? Can you use a profiler to break this down further?
• Alleviate the issue: Once the root cause is identified, alert the IT support and/or development teams to the issue’s existence. If possible, find a temporary workaround to the issue while you work on a more permanent resolution.

Datavail has developed a patented, time-tested “5S” methodology to help our clients proactively optimize their Oracle EBS deployments. This approach includes:

• Applying best practices for SQL programming.
• Using data table statistics to make SQL engines more efficient and performant.
• Giving your EBS ecosystem enough space through data lifecycle management, including archiving, purging, and deleting data when appropriate.
• Monitoring user sessions to avoid contention and locking issues.
• Scheduling processes to avoid competition for resources and performance issues.

Want more information about how we help clients fine-tune their Oracle EBS deployments? We wrote the book on it—literally. Check out our white paper “The 5S Approach to Improving Database Performance.”

Conclusion

Performance tuning is an essential best practice for your Oracle EBS deployment, ensuring that your IT infrastructure continues to operate smoothly and reliably. Yet performance tuning is just one of the many interlocking concerns that Oracle EBS users need to consider when managing their environment.

As an Oracle Platinum Partner with 17 different specializations, including Oracle EBS, Datavail has helped countless clients tweak and optimize their EBS deployments through careful, smart performance tuning. To learn more about the complexities of using Oracle EBS, and how you can take steps to resolve them, check out our white paper “The Top 6 Challenges of Managing Oracle EBS Environments.”