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Oracle Performance Tuning and Optimization
(Publisher: Macmillan Computer Publishing)
Author(s): Edward Whalen
ISBN: 067230886x
Publication Date: 04/01/96

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Chapter 18
Decision Support System

The decision support field has been growing in the last few years. Information that marketing and sales personnel had only dreamed of a few years ago is now available at their fingertips. Decision support is becoming a mainstream field.

A decision support system (DSS) uses the wealth of data usually gathered with OLTP systems to help you better meet market needs. A DSS can be used to perform many of the following business tasks:

  Pricing and promotions. You can determine when to offer promotions and at what price by looking at customer buying habits.
  Supply and demand management. By looking at data of which products sell and when, you may better be able to forecast supply and demand.
  Profit and revenue management. Trend analysis of expenses and profits can help you make better business decisions.
  Customer satisfaction study. You can determine trends and results of these studies based on many different criteria.
  Market share study. You can analyze the market based on the entire market by region or by organization.
  Shipping management. A wealth of data is at your fingertips.

These are just a few examples of the kind of activities available to you with this new, enabling technology.


NOTE:  When I refer to decision support as new, I am not trying to give the impression that DSS systems have not been around for a while. In fact, DSS systems have been in existence for quite some time. DSS is new in the sense that an upsurge of activity in the area of DSS has been happening over the last few years.

The increased use of DSS systems has been helped in part by the availability of new high-performance, low-cost systems that make DSS available to more of the market than ever before. DSS class machines are now available for well under $1 million and the performance of these machines is continually increasing.

In the next few years, DSS machines will be in use in areas that have not even been thought of yet. I believe that this will happen at both the very high end of computer technology and at the mid-range level. At the high end, computer technology will provide for faster CPUs and larger systems than ever before. The improved hardware will allow DSS systems to be designed to solve business problems that cannot be done with today’s technology. Problems that would have taken months to compute will be done in days or hours.

At the other end of the spectrum are small businesses that do not have access to large systems; these businesses will purchase mid-range servers at reasonable prices to perform DSS functions. These businesses will become much more effective with this valuable tool.

The OLTP and batch systems are used to keep your business running on a day-to-day basis; the DSS system is used to predict trends and enable you to make sound business decisions based on the most up-to-date and accurate information, delivered in a form you can use.


NOTE:  I realize that the word system is already in the DSS acronym (decision support system), but to simplify the flow of the book, I sometimes refer to a decision support system as a DSS system. Forgive the redundancy.

Characteristics of a DSS System

This section looks at some of the characteristics of a typical DSS system—if there is such a thing as a typical system. The following list generalizes some of the properties of a DSS:

  Queries against large volumes of data. The DSS system usually stores much more data than the typical OLTP system.
  Queries exhibit a variety of access patterns. Queries may be simple or quite complex with complicated joins and aggregations on large amounts of data.
  Queries are of an ad-hoc nature. This occurs because of the changing nature of the business models.
  Highly complex queries. Queries in a DSS system are far more complex than those in an OLTP system.
  Generates intense activity on the part of the server components. All aspects of the computer system are stressed during DSS queries.
  Usually implemented to stay synchronized with an online production database. The OLTP database is typically where the data is derived. As that database changes, the DSS database must keep up to date with it.

These characteristics typically make the load on the DSS system very high. In fact, because users do not typically use a DSS system for online processing, it is reasonable to push the system to its limits. Rather than spreading out the load and trying to achieve reasonable response times (as you do in an OLTP system), the goal of the DSS system is to push the system to its limits to get the work done as quickly as possible.

Because of the amount of data being queried and the complexity of those queries, it is not uncommon for DSS queries to take hours or even days. Do not expect to sit at your monitor, waiting for the DSS queries to respond. Note: By maximizing throughput, some jobs may suffer in terms of response time.


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