Value: A capacity planning exercise provides the organization with the ability to understand the data granularity that the system will be dealing with, data retention schemes, business SLA and helps build a system to satisfy those needs right from the start as opposed to "facing the music" when the system is being used for business decisions.

Approach

The Service Level Agreement (SLA) with the business community needs to be established first to understand their basic needs towards data retention and data granularity. Once the SLA has been established, the following elements need to be defined:

• Approximate Data volumes associated with system at each basic fact and aggregation level necessary on a daily basis
• Data retention policy
• Record length associated with each fact table
• Number of business users that will be using the system
• Approximate growth associated with the system in terms of data volumes and usage

Once the metrics defined above have been identified, it is very easy to start defining a Capacity plan to derive the Hardware Sizing, Disk sub-system sizing necessary to support the data retention and associated needs.

Disk Sizing necessary to support the systems can be derived from the following formula:

Table Sizing + Index Sizing + UNDO Sizing + SORT Sizing + Disk needed to support Maintenance activities

CPU Sizing can be derived from the following formula:

(Number of business users / 5) + 2 CPU for Database processes

Get the most out of the investment your company is making with the best available in today’s marketplace – A Capacity and Hardware Architecture Plan from Mercury Software Consulting, Inc.

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