White Paper
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PERFORMANCE CHALLENGES
Designed for enterprises, PeopleSoft business applications achieve productivity and
efficiency gains by automating business processes such as Human Resources,
Finance, Supply Chain, Student Administration, and others.
The main goals of a PeopleSoft implementation are to improve workflow, reduce
costs, and ensure reliable and timely data management. Although PeopleSoft
delivers superior functionality to the end users, the application’s platform
independent architecture can cause performance degradation when deployed.
PeopleSoft’s applications are developed in a generic fashion to work on a number of
different vendor’s databases such as Oracle, Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server and
DB2. Data retrieval and data modification from PeopleSoft to the database is done
through generic SQL statements that are compatible across all RDBMS. Every
RDBMS has a unique architecture and processes SQL statements in different ways.
Therefore, generic SQL statements do not take advantage of any RDBMS
architecture and specific platform characteristics, which results in performance
inefficiencies. Another performance challenge that PeopleSoft applications have is
that every implementation resides in a different database environment with
different data volumes, transaction rates, hardware and software configurations.
This means that no two PeopleSoft implementations are alike, resulting in unique
performance characteristics. For these reasons, PeopleSoft applications are not
tuned for maximum performance for every implementation right out of the box.
SQL optimization, indexing, and database parameters changes offer the best
opportunity to improve database and application performance, resulting in
considerable savings by delaying expensive hardware upgrades, avoiding time-
consuming database redesigns, and avoiding lost business opportunities due to data
unavailability.
Poor performing SQL statements and indexes are responsible for 60 to 90 percent
of application performance problems. According to industry experts, SQL activities
typically consume as much as 70% of the system resources in a database server.
In many cases, resource consumption by SQL activity can be as high as 80-90%.
The primary problem with database applications is that databases are dynamic
environments, data volumes and user populations grow, new versions of
applications and databases are implemented, and server configurations change.
These database and application changes make performance unpredictable and
uncertain.
Quest SQL Optimizer for Oracle maximizes PeopleSoft’s performance by focusing on
those database factors that contribute up to 90% of performance problems: SQL
statements, indexes, and database changes. Quest SQL Optimizer allows for the
management and prediction of performance changes; therefore decisions to alter
the database environment can be made with a higher level of confidence.