Hello,

I've been plugging a lot of the well-known DB2 performance formulas into a
spreadsheet to analyze performance, and I'm a little unsure of the
relevance of the async read percentage (ARP) formula. As I understand it,
the formula is (POOL_ASYNC_DATA_READS + POOL_ASYNC_INDEX_READS) /
(POOL_DATA_P_READS + POOL_INDEX_P_READS), and a high percentage is supposed
to denote an object that sees a lot of sequential scans. Articles I've read
warn that in an OLTP environment, a high ARP is a potential indicator of
queries that scan a lot, either because of inefficient SQL or poor
indexing.

If that is true, I can't say I completely agree, especially on a database
like mine, which is used for both reporting and OLTP. Here are some
relevent numbers that I think will assist in my explanation:

POOL_ASYNC_DATA_READS=104109
POOL_ASYNC_INDEX_READS=13187
POOL_INDEX_P_READS=148458
POOL_INDEX_L_READS=27483831
POOL_DATA_P_READS=171903
POOL_DATA_L_READS=5195306

To me, these numbers indicate an object that sees a ton of synchronous
buffer pool hits, since logical reads exceed physical reads by as many as
two orders of magnitude in some areas. However, ARP calculates out to 36%
for the above numbers, which initially led me to believe I supposed to Do
Something to reduce ARP. In other cases, ARP was as high as 50%, so you
might understand how relying on ARP alone could cause me to worry.

Nowadays, I don't look at ARP by itself anymore, but instead view it in the
context of logical reads as well. The numbers above show extremely high
buffer pool hit ratio, and in the very rare event that disk access is
necessary, it's only caused by prefetching about a third of the time.

Does everyone agree? Please let me know if I'm missing something important.

Fred Sobotka
IBM Certified Database Administrator - DB2 UDB V8.1 for Linux, Unix, and
Windows
CollegeNET, Inc.

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