Database server tools

The database server provides tools and utilities that capture snapshot information about your configuration and performance.

You can use these utilities regularly to build a historical profile of database activity, which you can compare with current operating-system resource-utilization data. These comparisons can help you discover which database server activities have the greatest impact on system-resource utilization. You can use this information to identify and manage your high-impact activities or adjust your database server or operating-system configuration.

The database server tools and utilities that you can use for performance monitoring include:
  • The onstat utility
  • The onlog utility
  • The oncheck utility
  • The ON-Monitor utility (on UNIX™ only)
  • The onperf utility (on UNIX only)
  • DB-Access and the system-monitoring interface (SMI), which you can use to monitor performance from within your application
  • SQL administration API commands

You can use onstat, onlog, or oncheck commands invoked by the cron scheduling facility to capture performance-related information at regular intervals and build a historical performance profile of your database server application. The following sections describe these utilities.

You can use SQL SELECT statements to query the system-monitoring interface (SMI) from within your application.

The SMI tables are a collection of tables and pseudo-tables in the sysmaster database that contain dynamically updated information about the operation of the database server. The database server constructs these tables in memory but does not record them on disk. The onstat utility options obtain information from these SMI tables.

You can use cron and SQL scripts with DB-Access or onstat utility options to query SMI tables at regular intervals.
Tip: The SMI tables are different from the system catalog tables. System catalog tables contain permanently stored and updated information about each database and its tables (sometimes referred to as metadata or a data dictionary).

You can use ON-Monitor to check the current database server configuration.

You can use onperf to display database server activity with the Motif window manager.