Ajarn Mark Caldwell Blog

When is a vendor presentation not just a sales pitch?  When it actually provides information that is useful whether you buy their product or not.  And during the first half of the keynote session on Thursday, Veritas did it right!

First, they started well with a video.  Sure it was a take-off of The Sopranos, called the Corpranos, and it was kind of silly, but it got the point across that they wanted to make, spoofing corporate meetings where everyone is defending their little piece of the IT solution (database vs. application tier vs. networking, etc., etc.).  It was an entertaining / amusing way to start his talk, and Chuck Delouis from Veritas referred to the characters throughout his talk.  Now, we all knew that Veritas had a solution to this problem that they'd be happy to sell you, and they were giving away a free book, but Chuck did not talk about either of those.  Instead, he shared some of the key lessons they have learned, and left it up to each person to decide whether to look into their product line or not.  VERY smart move on his part because 1) it kept me interested...a sales pitch would have just turned me off; 2) I have a favorable impression of them and will keep them in mind for future needs because I like how he did it and the company came across as very knowledgeable.

Since he did this in a fairly public presentation, I'm assuming it's okay to relay a few of the points he made.  From my notes:  The root causes of performance issues are found in:  a) Hardware 10% of the time; b) the Database 15%; and 3) the Application 70%.  So it's worth doing some research before committing to purchase bigger, faster hardware.

Also, he listed the Top 5 Performance Issues with SQL 2000:

5) Storage - Waiting on I/O.  Is the DB over indexed? Hardware performance? Bad app design?
4) Who is really using the database?  An Access DB connecting can hog resources.
3) How long is everyone waiting?  Lock waits vs. CPU usage.
2) What is the App tier doing to me?  DB may appear to be the cause but perhaps the application tier is hammering away at it unmercifully due to a SQL statement inside a loop unnecessarily.
1) Who are my top consumers?

Overall, well done!  Informative without requiring a purchase.  No real sales pitch, although to answer the above questions their products might be handy.  And a little humor and a little action with the video.

HP did the keynote on Friday, but I didn't make it to that so I can't compare their performance.  If anyone did go, feel free to post some comments or a link to your own review.