Performance monitor for a relational information system

Abstract

Although some relational information systems have recently become available for production use, very few, if any of them, contain facilities to collect performance data. This paper describes a method for implementing a performance monitor and some of the data collected by this performance monitor which was recently installed in the REGIS (RElational General Information System). REGIS is currently being used within General Motors.The performance monitor is used to collect data about the usefulness of the command language, performance improvements following major system upgrades and performance predictions based on past runs. While installing the performance monitor several system deficiencies were uncovered.Correction of the deficiencies has already improved performance by almost an order of magnitude. Future improvements are expected to improve performance by at least another order of magnitude.

Command use in a relational database system

“…Monitoring capabilities had previously been incorporated in Regis to provide information on every Regis session. 6 A 1-row table is created to describe a session: the user ID, total commands, total central processing unit (cpu) time, total elapsed time, and so on. For every session that terminates normally, this table is written to a file that is periodically analyzed to provide a global summary of Regis use.…”