Hotsos at Work: Íslandsbanki / Reykjavík (Iceland)
Íslandsbanki is among the largest banks in Iceland. With more than 1,100 users on both internally developed and pre-packaged applications, the bank considers itself heavily reliant on Oracle technology.
Out of Control
In 2003, senior DBA Torfi Ólafur Sverrisson and database consultant Guđmundur Jósepsson resolved to end what was becoming an all-too-common issue for Íslandsbanki’s more than 50-person IT department: slow Oracle systems.
“We began looking for methods and tools that would give us more control of the performance of our critical systems,” says Sverrisson. “After our initial testing we knew for certain that Method R and the Hotsos Profiler were a revolutionary combination to help solve these complex problems. They have worked for us in an incredibly successful way.”
“Method R and the Hotsos Profiler have worked for us in an incredibly successful way.”
Hotsos founder Cary Millsap teaches that traditional approaches to Oracle performance problems are inefficient at best, and often they fail completely. “Many customers work for months—sometimes years—on a performance problem. They never find it because they’ve been taught to look at the wrong metrics.” Millsap explains the Hotsos method called “Method R” in the O’Reilly book Optimizing Oracle Performance.
A Cultural Change
After working for ten years in a traditional Oracle DBA role, Sverrisson now helps developers and DBAs at Íslandsbanki work as a team, saving significant amounts of money for the bank. “The Hotsos Profiler shows us immediately where the performance issues are, so the team works only on the root cause issues that will result in high-impact improvement. We can now diagnose performance issues accurately and in a fraction of the time we used to spend.”
Sverrisson continues, “Hotsos has stimulated a cultural change in the way our DBAs and developers work together. Our teams are now closer to the business, and they focus on the end-user experience, not just their individual area of expertise.”
“Our teams are now closer to the business, and they focus on the end-user experience, not just their individual area of expertise.”
Sverrisson says, “We had started to develop our own methods to diagnose performance problems, but our approach of gathering data was quite heavy and took far too much time.” This changed after Jósepsson arranged for Hotsos to teach its Performance Diagnosis 101 course at the University of Reykjavík in June 2003.
Hotsos founder Gary Goodman explains, “The diversity of staff [both DBAs and developers] that the bank sent to our PD101 course highlighted their commitment to improvement. Our method and tools have the most impact when an organization adopts them broadly. Íslandsbanki is experiencing dramatic results because they have encouraged both developers and DBAs to seek out optimal system performance in everything they do.”
Savings and Scalability
The bank’s savings come from making their Oracle-based applications do more work with less hardware. Many of today’s IT professionals began their careers in an era when computer hardware budgets were abundant. “We never thought we needed to conserve capacity, since every year the speed of our servers was expanding,” says Sverrisson. “If an application performed poorly, then we just upgraded our hardware. This approach cost a lot, and often it simply didn’t work.” Shrinking budgets made the problem even tougher.
The bank’s savings come from making their Oracle-based applications do more work with less hardware.
The solution for many of the bank’s performance problems has been application optimization, which Íslandsbanki has learned can be accomplished for both their internally developed and their pre-packaged applications. With its new Hotsos-inspired way of approaching system performance, and with the Hotsos Profiler to make the method easy for everyone to use, the bank so far has saved more than USD 1,000,000. Sverrisson continues, “But it’s not just about the direct cost savings. Optimizing our applications also provides a completely new level of scalability that has become a priority as we grow our business.”
About Hotsos
Hotsos Enterprises, Ltd. is a Dallas-based company with more than 500 customers and clients worldwide that use the company's software products, classroom and on-site education, and consulting services to improve the performance of their Oracle systems. Hotsos's revolutionary methods and tools help database administrators and application developers solve performance problems faster and more permanently than ever before. For more information on Hotsos products and solutions, visit www.hotsos.com or call +1.888.8HOTSOS.
