RE: TOAD vs BMC's XRAY

I'll jump in here if I may.

There's another spotlight/DBXray type tool that we are starting to bring in to the UK market place at the moment, that is being received *very* well. The tool is called MGA Eagle Eye, which is developed over in Australia by Mark Gurry's company (http://www.mga-it.com). Many haven't heard about it - some on this list I know have..

It does most anything that Spotlight can do - with a few added bonuses. Many of you will have seen Cary Millsap's ethos of diagnosing "performance problems" via measuring actual user response times. Eagle Eye will allow you to feed a script, or set of scripts (an average form for example) in to an engine that will execute the "suite" of a scripts on a pre-defined basis. You set an acceptable response time threshold, and if that suite goes over the threshold, Eagle Eye will do a system wide "trace", finding out who else is active at that time, what they are running and the explain plans, and will gather any system wide or object wait statistics - giving you a "snapshot" of what was happening when performance went out the window.. The history of executions is recorded, so that if someone calls saying "Last Wednesday I had some problems doing FooBar" - you can have some details to say "Oh yes, it was X", or "No, sorry - the problem wasn't with the Oracle, please bug somebody else!!" ;)

It also gives a mechanism for generating HTML based reports on SQL "suites", and has just had a web application benchmarking module added to it as well.

You can check it out on Mark Gurry's company site (as above) or on the Cool-Tools site (we are currently handling UK & Europe) here: http://www.cool-tools.co.uk/Products/eagleeye.html .

If you would like any more info on it Fermin, or a demo, please feel free to contact me directly.

(Sorry list for the shameless plug)

Regards

Mark

 Mark Leith             | T: +44 (0)1905 330 281
 Sales & Marketing      | F: +44 (0)870 127 5283
 Cool Tools UK Ltd      | E: mark_at_cool-tools.co.uk
===================================================
           http://www.cool-tools.co.uk
       Maximising throughput & performance

-----Original Message-----
From: ml-errors_at_fatcity.com [mailto:ml-errors_at_fatcity.com]On Behalf Of Steve Perry
Sent: 23 July 2003 03:59
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L Subject: Re: TOAD vs BMC's XRAY

great review :)
I told them the same thing, but they're developer driven. The customer using the product comes 2nd. A flashing widget is more important to them than useful data to the DBA. The slowness has a been an issue since web dba. That required 256mb of ram. I asked if they were going to include memory and they said everybody runs their desktop with 500meg of ram or even better "They'll need to upgrade". :))

my 2¢

• Original Message ----- To: "Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L" <ORACLE-L_at_fatcity.com> Sent: Tuesday, July 22, 2003 1:49 PM

> OK, I got the e-mail to try a trial of DBXray from BMC. Crap, I tell you.
> Crap. Crap, crap, crap. To be truthful, I'm not sure how much we pay for
> Spotlight, but for $2500/user, DBXray has a LOT to be desired.
>
> I've apparently been spoiled by Quest's Spotlight interface. After a
> 15-minute trial of DBXray (granted, that's a little slim), here's what my
> kneejerk of what I see to be the advantages of Spotlight on Oracle (SoO)
> over DBXray (DBX):
>
> 1) It's in freakin Java. 60MB of mem to launch and it's sloooow, even on
a
> 2.4Ghz w/512MB. Half of this is a Java Windohs service.
>
> 2) It doesn't understand ONAMES, so I would need to manually maintain yet
> another repository of Oracle Network connections.
>
> 3) SoO's color scheme is configurable. DBX seems to be fixed on a scheme
of
> light gray on light blue. Very low contrast and I can't imagine this is
> viewable by color-blind folk.
>
> 4) SoO's interface is scalable. DBX's main dashboard is fixed in size.
>
> 5) No menu access to drilldowns in DBX. Difficult for neophyte or
> occasional users to locate the correct image map on the main dashboard of
> DBX.
>
> 6) Session drilldown has fixed set of columns in DBX. "Tune" button only
> provides weak text-only explain plan. SoO provides two different methods
> for doing explain plans out-of-the box, and is expandable with optional
> software like the-product-formerly-known-as-SQLab.
>
> 7) Very few options for data display in DBX. SoO, for example, allows you
> to turn off BCHR collection as well as configure which columns to return
> from V$SESSION for the session drilldown (see #6).
>
> Man, there's so much more I don't want to take more time on it. SoO is
> clearly a *far* superior product when it comes to instance monitoring and
> tuning. I tried thinking of a single advantage of DBX over SoO, and I
can't
> come up with one.
>
> Now to see if DBX will actually uninstall...
>
>
> Rich
>
> Rich Jesse System/Database Administrator
> rjesse_at_qtiworld.com Quad/Tech Inc, Sussex, WI USA
>
> p.s. Jacques, you can tell Steve N (Quest Monitoring Product Manager)
that
> I'm a "large" for Quest t-shirts, polos, and/or jackets. ;)
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Jesse, Rich
> > Sent: Tuesday, July 22, 2003 11:27 AM
> > To: 'ORACLE-L_at_fatcity.com'
> > Subject: RE: TOAD vs BMC's XRAY
> >
> >
> > I haven't used DBXray (yet -- maybe it's not an automated
> > process to download a trial?), but I don't feel TOAD is the
> > best at DB administration, especially for performance
> > tuning/monitoring. Then again, it's been awhile since I've
> > used TOAD's optional DBA module, since it's no longer
> > available in the beta. For development, I think it's the
> > best, especially at US $795/user. I've been a TOAD user
> > since v4, when it was Jim McDaniel's freeware baby.
> >
> > For tracing into running SQLs I prefer using Quest's
> > Spotlight. Aside from a slick interface (makes impressive
> > screen shots for management-types), it is very easy to drill
> > down into problem areas, like resource hogging sessions you
> > mention. I still think that any tool requires knowledge of
> > the underlying queries they use to fully understand what the
> > tool is telling you, I just happen to prefer Spotlight's interface.
> >
> > If I ever get the email for the DBXray trial from BMC, I'll
> > let you know what I think of that compared to the others.
> >
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: Fermin Bernaus [mailto:fbernaus_at_sammic.com]
> > > Sent: Tuesday, July 22, 2003 11:20 AM
> > > To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
> > > Subject: TOAD vs BMC's XRAY
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > Hi there,
> > >
> > > I am considering buying an administration tool and
> > > programmer's tool. The two I know are Toad and BMC's XRAY but
> > > since I do not know them very well I have difficulties
> > > deciding which of them is the best. What I need more is to
> > > tune the database, trace into time and CPU consuming SQLs, a
> > > procedure / trigger editor and debugger.
> > >
> > > Or maybe you know better tools than these two... any
> > > help will be greatly appreciated.
> >
> --
> Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.net
> --
> Author: Jesse, Rich
> INET: Rich.Jesse_at_qtiworld.com
>
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--
Author: Steve Perry
  INET: sperry_at_sprynet.com

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