Capacity Planning - Introduction

Capacity planning for a database infrastructure can be defined as the process of assessing the infrastructure requirements for a database environment before deployment, and projecting and predicting the future requirements for the infrastructure even after the environment gets deployed. Capacity planning involves various tests to measure how an environment should and will behave under the various factors that influence the environment, and planning for the infrastructure with the necessary resources that will help to achieve the response in a pre defined manner.

§ Pre-configuration & Post-configuration Capacity Planning
As mentioned above, the entire Capacity Planning process can be broadly categorized to the planning and the subsequent changes that we do before the environment is deployed, and the planning and changes that we do after the environment is deployed and is in production. We can define these as “pre-configuration capacity planning” and “post-configuration capacity planning”. The pre-configuration capacity planning is often referred as “sizing” the database infrastructure. The post-configuration capacity planning is an ongoing cyclic process of monitoring and projecting, planning and modifying. In precise, Capacity Planning for a database infrastructure can be pictorially represented as below.


In each of the upcoming sections, we will be discussing these processes in detail, and how to carry out each process for the various hardware and other requirements.