Informix DBA Survival Guide, Second Edition

Getting Your Marching Orders

When you are evaluating a new tuning assignment, you need to get examples of specific problems that you are to solve. Many times you'll just hear a very unspecific "the system's slow," but often you'll be presented with a detailed laundry list of problems with the system. Typical things that you'll see are:

• Performance slowing down

• System hangs or freeze up

• System crashes

• Specific queries take too long

• Random errors

• Jobs failing "for no reason"

• Contention errors

• Extent sizing problems

Unfortunately, these errors do not always come with neat little labels on them that tell you where they come from. For example, poor UNIX kernel configuration can result in seemingly random errors that seem to make no sense. Usually, a system's ...