Introduction

Oracle Hyperion Financial Management requires a relational database to store application data. Each Financial Management application contains a set of tables, indexes, stored procedures, and other objects. Because the number and sizes of these objects vary according to the user’s data set, application design, and reporting requirements, it is difficult to specify a concrete set of rules for setting up the database. This section addresses the two most common issues that arise during deployment to Oracle databases:

• Oracle DB running out of memory to support the required number of database connections

• Poor performance during reporting and consolidation

Both of these issues can be traced to improper Oracle parameter settings and configurations. Creating a System Global Area (SGA) that is too large limits the amount of free physical memory to support user connections and activities. Conversely, creating an SGA that is too small causes additional disk access, and slows down performance.

This section guides you through the process of monitoring a typical database and determining the proper initialization settings to maximize performance. You should repeat this process periodically to keep up with changes to your data set, workload, and application design.

Oracle 11g has made the process of monitoring and tuning the database much easier than previous versions. We strongly recommend using Oracle Enterprise Manager (both Data Control and Grid Control) to monitor, diagnose, and tune database performance. To obtain accurate instance statistics, Oracle recommends that you enable Oracle database Automatic Maintenance Tasks.

It is very important that tuning not be done immediately after database startup. At that point, the buffer caches are empty and no statistics have been collected. Always test and tune your database after a period of activity on Financial Management applications.