Mark Gurry & Associates: Performance Tuning Experts

With data volumes growing at a constant pace, companies embodying complex architectures are confronted with higher performance requirements to cater to a very large number of users. In such a scenario, performance tuning has become essential more than ever for discerning bottlenecks and equipping the infrastructure to handle increased loads. As observed by Mark Gurry, CEO of Mark Gurry & Associates (MGA), “Achieving acceptable response times goes way beyond database and SQL tuning and extends to complete end-to-end load testing and tuning.” An epitome of quality IT services, MGA assists companies with its best-selling performance tuning software. “We are experts in data and databases, performance load testing and tuning, empowering our clients business through self-service reporting and assisting with moving to the cloud,” says Gurry.

A boutique IT consulting company, MGA focuses on real-time data replication and integration, data migrations, data modeling, data transformation and loading, data cleansing, and data archival and purging. What makes MGA second to none is their know-how in Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL, SAP HANA, SAP IQ, MySQL, MongoDB and big data including complex migrations from one to another.

Playing it big in the market for almost three decades now, MGA executes performance tuning in the Oracle landscape, and has shouldered projects worth more than $400 million over the last few years. As revealed by Gurry, Oracle has evolved a long way from being a relational database only company to specializing in ERP and other business solutions, besides providing the underlying hardware and abundance of features including XML and JSON support.

That’s not all; Gurry highlights that Oracle has undergone significant improvements in the cloud, NoSQL databases, and database automated management, thereby driving improved availability and performance among organizations. MGA carries forward the Oracle developments and effectively leverages the MGA EagleEye—a performance regression testing tool—to enhance load generation capability such as AWR replay, trace file capture and replay along with extensive monitoring with drill downs. Consequently, the source of performance issues is diagnosed, accelerating the decision making processes. The EagleEye also comprises a SQL and database tuning mechanism to facilitate seamless functioning of processes. “MGA has profound expertise in providing database, performance and application support that goes way beyond standard operational database administration,” says Gurry.

To overcome the restrictions and slow replication of database schemas, the MGA Duplica—a tool for database replication—enables administrators to pull data from multiple sources into a single target while simultaneously replicating master sources. The MGA Duplica architecture stems from extremely large banks and stock exchanges, where the replication has minimal impact on the source systems and provides extremely high throughput to deliver real-time data to downstream systems. Duplica can run in a massively parallel mode in order to render best possible throughput and allows replication from tables to tables or views, likewise views to views or tables. Duplica is capable of supporting multiple database types and is often used to populate analytics databases in the cloud.

With its focus on performance and an impeccable track record, MGA is often the preferred choice of the senior management at client companies in implementing the ‘Move to the Cloud Strategy’ as well as ‘BI and Analytics Strategy’. For instance, MGA documented a strategy for a large Australian utility retailer which involved processes to move databases to the cloud. The client had over 1,000 databases, which were migrated by MGA; they now manage all of the retailer’s databases in the cloud.

Currently, MGA focuses on facilitating self-service reporting for both legacy systems and the cloud, for their clients. Traditionally associated with Analytics Power Users, self-service reporting removes the report development from the IT Group and provides data directly to the business strategists. MGA is delivering personalized reports and dashboards, which would provide lightning-fast response and display real-time data.