iCan Blog Archive

Previously I wrote about Job Level SQL Metrics in Collection Services. In this blog post, I will review the support added to the Performance Data Investigator (PDI) to allow you to view and analyze these job-level SQL metrics.

This function was delivered in the 7.2 release, and with PTFs on 7.1, as reviewed in the blog Navigator for i Enhancements; you will also want to verify that you have the PTFs installed and activated that were noted in the Job Level SQL Metrics in Collection Services blog.

The GUI for the SQL metrics is contained in a content package named Database. This content package will only show up under the list of perspectives in the Performance Data Investigator if you have the Performance Tools licensed program product (5770-PT1) installed; you just need the manager option. Put another way, the enablement for the database graphical interface in the Performance Data Investigator is shipped with PT1.

The SQL metrics are found in the Database perspectives available in the Performance Data Investigator, as the following screen capture shows:

You need to drill down into the Database I/O and subsequent folders to find the graphs and charts of data. There are views of both Physical and Logical Database I/O metrics:

An example of the Physical Database I/O Overview chart is below. You can see the SQL-related physical I/O metrics are summarized by time for the selected collection.

There are several different ways you can view database I/O – by job, thread, user profile, current user profile, subsystem, or server type – to give you various ways to review and analyze the metrics.

You will note that the Performance Data Investigator also has support to view data from the SQL plan cache and the SQL performance monitor. I don’t have time in this blog to go into details on using PDI to look at this data.

The Performance Data Investigator development team has documentation on that summarizes the enhancements that have been made. There is an article on the Database content package where you can find more information.

This blog post was edited for currency on March 24, 2020.

This blog post was originally published on IBMSystemsMag.com and is reproduced here by permission of IBM Systems Media.