ActiveBase Tuning Robot™  is a powerful and intuitive server-based SQL tuning software that delivers an automatic and continuous application tuning process on your production environments.

Through its automated SQL optimization process, ActiveBase Tuning Robot for Oracle:
  Automatically identifies long-running or resource intensive SQL statements from Oracle AWR or from an input file.

  Analyzes SQL statements for alternatives with unique execution plans using Hints while ensuring each alternative have identical result sets.

  Benchmarks relevant alternatives against a database environment (production or pre-production replication) to locate the most efficient execution alternative.

  Provides detailed execution statistics for comparison.

  Sorts benchmark results according to optimization objectives - best elapse time, CPU or I/O optimization.

  Enables to identify top SQL requests from production, while benchmarking on pre-production environment.

  Creates a summary XML rule file with all best SQL tuning improvements. The rule file can be imported into ActiveBase Performance™  in-line proxy in production or pre-production environment, for immediate application SQL fixing (rewrite), without touching application source-code or database configurations.

Technical
 How can ActiveBase Tuning Robot help Siebel applications?
Siebel suffers from long running user requests due to never-ending, resource draining un-tuned SQL requests (using rule based in common Siebel implementations).
ActiveBase Tuning Robot for Siebel automatically identifies the best Oracle ‘hint’ to dramatically speed response time and reduce resource waste.
Note:
In the Tuning robot define: sesionParameters.optimizer_max_permutations=2000
In case identifying qualified Oracle ‘hint’ alternatives is slow, run ‘ANALYZE’ on the schema with only 1% statistics.
Analyzing the database schema will speed alternative identification, saving processing resources and time.

 Where should the ActiveBase Tuning Robot run benchmark?
The ActiveBase Tuning Robot benchmark alternatives should be executed on a stable low-loaded pre-production environment, thus enabling to precisely compare the different executions and highlight the best alternative.
When running the benchmark on a production environment, ensure low overhead by running the benchmark in a serial mode (like opening a single Toad user for testing different alternatives). You can schedule Tuning Robot to run only at low times (e.g., after 16:00 or in the early morning) and stop it whenever production load on the system increases. The benchmark results can be analyzed by importing XML file into ActiveBase Performance or by Excel template reporting.

 ActiveBase Tuning Robot relies only on Oracle hints for performance improvement. What about rewrites?
The main reason for using hints is because rewrites can change the SQL result-set, where with Hints Oracle guarantees the same result set. Another reason for using hints is that the Oracle optimizer already performs many types of rewrites, making them useless.
Testing possible hints ensures the best execution plan while saving hours of expert DBA time.

 Does ActiveBase support a high availability configuration?
Yes from both perspectives:
a.) During database failover, ActiveBase will follow the failover transparently, servicing the failover database automatically.
b.) During an ActiveBase failover, clients are automatically bypassed to a failover instance of ActiveBase or bypassed directly to the database.

Backup
 What should be the backup procedure for ActiveBase?
You should backup the full installation files once in: home/active/java and home/active/[activebase Product].In addition, to backup full configuration and rules you need to regularly backup home/active/[ActiveBase Product]/cfg/directory.

  What processes should be monitored?
All ActiveBase products run using a single OS process that is defined during product installation-during the administration setup.
Default service name is the machine name, but it is always recommended to add a prefix: ab_[server_name] for easy identification. The specific process name can be identified in the machine top command.
ActiveBase also provides a script (monitor.zip found in our FTP site) that verifies user experience by testing user connection time regularly, returning error code and triggering email/SMS notification.