Tools Speed Database Recoveries

BMC Software Inc. and ActiveBase Ltd. are delivering tools to enable databases to recover faster from crashes.

Houston-based BMC this week is announcing seven data management tools for IBMs DB2 running in mainframe or distributed environments.

BMCs Recovery Management for DB2 1.1 features automatic selection of optimally efficient recovery strategies. The tool also lets database administrators run simulations to discover how long and how many resources it will take to recover a given database configuration.

One customer said automation features in Recovery Management could save him time compared with 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, its very manual. If the product has the smarts to be able to do that itself, thats good.”

A common theme with BMCs six other tool updates is new monitoring capabilities. For example, Version 2 of System Performance for DB2 features real-time monitoring and tuning of databases.

BMCs mainframe tools are available now. The distributed tools are due later this month.

Separately, ActiveBase, of Givatayim, Israel, last week introduced two Oracle Corp. database add-ons. ActiveBalance, available now, automatically balances loads among servers of multimode and replicated Oracle databases. The tool re-balances loads within 1 minute of failure and recovery, officials said.

ActivePool, due next quarter, speeds Oracle database application performance, reduces CPU load, improves an Oracle databases response time and increases database servers capacity.