I was pleased to see a mixture of Elite Enterprise IT and Finance staff attending my session at ILTA 2011: Maintaining a Healthy Elite System. Almost everyone takes away a nugget of information to explore further, either gained directly from the presentation or from group discussion. IT staff, whether new to managing Enterprise systems or veteran administrators, often find it useful to review tips for troubleshooting and keeping their systems running smoothly. Finance staff usually leave the session with increased comfort that their systems largely take care of themselves with scheduled maintenance jobs that run automatically, and also with an appreciation for the manual technical tasks that they may not have known their IT staff performed. I believe the nuggets discovered this year included PAL, SQL Nexus, and check_schema.ksh.
PAL (Performance Analysis of Logs) and SQL Nexus, both free downloads from codelplex.com, are two open source utilities that help system administrators run quick performance bottleneck analyses. Tuned for specific server roles and hardware configurations, both utilities quickly process large volumes of historic performance data and show the results in easily readable reports—a nice alternative to importing the raw data into Excel and defining formulas and graphs to search for problem trends. Further, these tools provide a straightforward way to identify a qualitative performance baseline against which to compare future performance.
Soon after the conference, Elite will post check_schema.ksh on its knowledge base. Producing a report that can be used to identify missing standard objects, like indexes and columns, this Korn shell script compares the schema of your actual Enterprise database against the standard schema that the source code for your Enterprise version defines. Reestablishing missing indexes or columns will help avoid performance problems or application errors that may result from the missing objects.
For the most part, maintaining a healthy Elite Enterprise system is a hands-off activity. However when problems do arise, having knowledge of the system infrastructure and a few powerful but uncomplicated tools in your arsenal will reduce the stress and time needed to resolve them.
Bruce Rosen is a team lead technical consultant with Elite
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