Blending monitoring capabilities with powerful developer tools, Quest Software Inc.s Quest Central makes it easier to optimize database systems.
Database performance indicates not only business productivity but also business problems. Quest Central, which Priceline. com relies on to monitor its database infrastructure, includes several tools that will help IT managers detect these problems early—and it even provides suggestions for fixing the problems.
The Performance Analysis module reads the memory in the database server to check the state of transactions and performance. Using the module, an IT manager can quickly analyze the workload on a live database server to find which SQL statements, users and machines are eating up the most resources.
When performance problems are found, the SQL Tuner module examines questionable code. The tool can be configured to find bad code and to make suggestions for fixing it, or it can be set to automatically rewrite SQL code to run more efficiently.
SQL Tuner makes suggestions, such as when to add or drop indexes, and will be useful for database administrators who are unfamiliar with certain platforms (for example, a Microsoft Corp. SQL Server database administrator learning to optimize Oracle Corp. databases).
The Quest Central Space Management module analyzes storage used by database servers to find fragmentation problems. Using this tool, an IT administrator can determine which tables are fragmented to help speed up read access and I/O.
Quest Central Space Management can also move database objects to optimize storage resource utilization while the database remains online and can display usage trends that are helpful when planning storage upgrades.
The Quest Central Spotlight management tool gives IT managers a graphical view of database health. Spotlight highlights such things as memory utilization, swapping and disk access. As problems occur in these areas, the colors of representative icons on the management GUI change.
The starting price of the Quest Central system is $2,400; prices increase according to the number of CPUs on the database platform.
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