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BMC Software Inc. and ActiveBase Ltd. are coming out with new ways to recover faster from database crash and burn.
Houston-based BMC on Monday will announce seven new data management tools for IBMs DB2 database management system running in both mainframe and distributed environments.
Recovery Management for DB2 1.1 features automatic selection of optimally efficient recovery strategies. The tool also allows DBAs (database administrators) to run simulations to discover how long and how many resources it would take to recover a given database configuration.
One customer said that BMCs automating of Recovery Management could save him plenty of time typically spent doing manual database log rollback. “Depending on when you took your last backup and how much data you have, [that could take] hours,” said Joe Borges, senior technical specialist at Bank of Montreal, in Toronto. “Right now it is very manual. If the product has the smarts to be able to do that itself, thats good.”
Four new tool versions for mainframe environments are System Performance for DB2 2, Database Administration for DB2 1.2, Database Performance for DB2 1.1 and Application Performance for DB2 2. On the distributed side, BMC will introduce SQL-BackTrack for DB2 UDB 2 and SQL-Explorer for DB2 UDB 6.0.02. A common theme with these tool updates is new monitoring capabilities: For example, System Performance for DB2 2 enables real-time monitoring and tuning of databases.
Separately, ActiveBase, of Givatayim, Israel, earlier this week introduced two new add-on products for Oracle Corp.s namesake database management system. The first product, called ActiveBalance, automatically keeps the load balanced between all servers of multimode/replicated Oracle databases. Within 1 minute after failure or recovery of a node of Real Application Cluster, Parallel Server and Symmetric Replication Servers, the tool automatically rebalances loads—a chore that can take hours otherwise, according to Yoram Nissenboim, ActiveBases chairman.
ActiveBase also rolled out ActivePool, a tool that speeds up Oracle database application performance, reduces DBMS CPU load, improves the databases response time and increases database servers capacity, officials said. ActivePool for Oracle enterprise server is available now priced starting at $15,000. ActiveBalance, for which pricing has not yet been released, will be available in the first quarter of 2003.
BMCs mainframe tools are available now, with pricing based on IBMs mainframe tiered pricing model. System Performance for DB2 2 starts at $30,000; Application Performance for DB2 2 starts at $21,800; Database Performance for DB2 1.1 starts at $38,000; Database Administration for DB2 1.2 starts at $86,300; and Recovery Management for DB2 1.1 starts at $68,300. Prices scale up based on database size and server MIPS (millions of instructions per second) ratings. B
BMCs distributed tools will be available later this month. SQL-BackTrack for DB2 UDB 2 will cost $5,610 for up to 25 GB of storage. SQL-Explorer for DB2 UDB 6.0.02 will cost $3,140 per Windows NT workgroup server.