Business Challenge
Like other retailers, Dillard’s faces the challenge of processing transactions that require complex information about pricing, promotional offers, and loyalty discounts. If its mainframe-based IBM® Db2® database can’t deliver fast, real-time performance for online and in-store sales—especially during holidays and other busy sales periods—quality of service and customer satisfaction can suffer.
BMC Solution
Dillard’s uses BMC Database Performance for Db2 (now called BMC AMI Database Performance for Db2®) and BMC System Performance for Db2 to monitor Db2 systems, detect performance problems, and alert the IT staff to take corrective action before outages occur. The staff used the BMC APPTUNE component to create a “top 20” list of transactions that were the biggest consumers of MIPS.
Business Impact
BMC SQL Performance for Db2 (now called BMC AMI SQL Performance for Db2®) helps the staff identify poorly performing SQL quickly and easily. The staff has dramatically reduced the number of MIPS used to free computing power for complex transactions while postponing costly mainframe upgrades.
- SQL tuning efforts reduced CPU utilization by 35%.
- Better utilization allowed Dillard’s to avoid a costly CPU upgrade that would have been required to handle today’s complex transactions.
- A “what-if” capability helped reduce risk from making changes to critical applications.
- For one application, Dillard’s reduced MIPS consumption by 90 percent.
- BMC APPTUNE enabled Dillard’s to identify its top 20 most CPU-consuming applications.
“By regularly using the BMC solutions to identify the top consumers of MIPS, we’ve been able to prioritize our efforts and start with the ones that would have the biggest impact on CPU consumption. Our developers use the tool more because the interface is so easy to work with.”
— Marc Tougaw, Db2 Systems Programmer, Dillard’s