Mark,
I do not think this thread is OT ... this is till very much on topic. I have been gaining so many views on SLA ... I love this topic.
Raj
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Rajendra dot Jamadagni at nospamespn dot com
All Views expressed in this email are strictly personal.
QOTD: Any clod can have facts, having an opinion is an art !
-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Richard [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Thursday, June 05, 2003 3:00 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
Subject: Re: Re[2]: performance questions
Jonathan,
Your comment "this is probably harder than it sounds" should be reworded to
"this IS harder than it sounds". I've been involved in these bumfights
before and they are never pleasant, especially when a contract of
significant question is on the line (like a $3m / month performance bonus).
A simple example of re-negotiation is a batch system (system A) dependent
on data from another system (system B). If the SLA says "system A will be
available by 7:00am each day" and system B starts delivering the data at
2:00am instead of midnight, then system A might try to renegotiate for a
new deadline. Of course in reality the response will be "I don't care, you
just be complete by 7:00am still".
I think most times this point relates to an SLA which wasn't written
correctly and needs to be updated. Say the SLA had a token query which
must execute from a clients desktop and return within 2 seconds. Initially
the ping time between desktop and host was 20ms but something changed and
the ping is now 200ms. Add in a few round trips and suddenly you've eaten
away the 2 seconds regardless of query execution time. Did the original
SLA have a clause about ping time in it? If not it probably should have,
but since we are only human it's easy to forget. Of course the real trick
is to prove the degradation in network performance - who would ever keep
ping stats?
Alternatively an SLA might be based on a customer-base of 10,000 customers
and a company acquisition might mean the customer base will grow to 100,000
customers - this might trigger SLA re-negotiation depending on the wording
of the SLA and the generousity of the company. It would be nice to think
that companies would be reasonable in this circumstance but sometimes it's
a battle. I guess an intra-company SLA (where no money is typically on the
line) is easier to manage that one with a financial price attached.
Anyway I'll stop now - I think this has reached OT status for the Oracle
list and I'm not really the most qualified person to speak about this. I'm
just the guy who has had to "prove it wasn't our fault".
Regards,
Mark.
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