Performance tuning is perhaps one of the area’s that is most neglected in AGRESSO. Tuned correctly though, the speed at which the system can process data can be greatly increased. There are generally a number of scenarios which highlight poor performance:-

It is not always possible to tune every system to a state of there being a noticeable different. This may be because

• The hardware is old and requires replacing
• The hardware was incorrectly sized when the system was originally implemented
• It’s a known performance issue that is fixed in a more recent release of the software

However, even with the above problems in a lot of systems it is still usually possible to find reasonable increases in speed and responsiveness.

In most instances though, it is possible to get sometimes very large increases in performance by tuning the system. Most performance gains are found in the relational database system that Agresso uses to store data in. This is true of both MS SQL Server and Oracle based systems; as both of them have the same underlying table and index structure.

A commonly asked question is

“Why is Agresso not tuned correctly when it’s installed?”

The concept of tuning a database when it is first installed and when it contains no real amount of data, is quite difficult. And from a relational database persceptive is a non-sensical and very inefficient way of doing things.

Agresso is a modular system with each section of functionality having it’s own set of tables. For example, the General Ledger (GL) module has it’s own set of tables, has does the Timesheet entry (TS) module, has does the Purchase Order (PO) and every other module.

The database is initially made up of over a thousand tables (depending on the version of Agresso) with each of these tables having one or more indexes on them. This scenario provides adequate performance for a lot of smaller systems. The problems slowly arise when the database begins to grow as more data goes into the system. Now, when a report is run, it no longer queries a table with several thousand rows of data, it may be querying tens of millions of rows. This can have quite an impact on performance.

Further to the above scenario, there are a large number of tables which allow a customer to set up customised fields (DIM1, DIM2 etc). This can also lead to a slow down of enquiries, reports and Excelerator reports.

Excelerator reports can be created or modified to suit each individual company. Although they may produce the data that you require, there is no consideration for how long they take to run or how much load they put onto the central AGRESSO database server.

"What kind of performance increases can be achieved? "

As stated earlier, there will always be a handful of systems where it is not always possible to tune it to any noticeable degree. However, increasing the speed of an enquiry from 30 seconds to 1 second will be possible on some systems. Tuning AGRESSO reports and Excelerator reports down from several minutes to several seconds is also achievable.

Tuning a particular process which would normally slow the system down (and even possibly cause the system to function incorrectly) is the level of tuning that realistically can be done in a relatively short period of time.

Quite often many companies do not have a dedicated DBA or they may have DBA's how may lack the necessary knowledge of how the AGRESSO system is put together or used. Or it may simply be that the performance problems you are experiencing are not related to the database.

Tuning of Microsoft SQL Server databases, Oracle databases or the AGRESSO system can be provided.