Re: A question for anyone using BMC's SQL-Backtrack

There is a customer base for BMC's products. I personally believe it used to be (pre-Oracle 7.3) any Oracle customer, because the Oracle support was pretty limited. The Oracle supporting products have improved so much that now I believe the customer base is restricted to any multi-vendor shop (as well as customers with BMC experience).

IMHO, BMC's biggest strength is that they provide the same, or similar, tools across a number of operating systems and database engines. It tries to hide the vagaries of HP-UX vs AIX vs Solaris vs Windows and Oracle vs DB2 vs ....

This makes the product suite perfect for a help desk operations center monitoring environment where it is important to be able to glance at the supervisory monitors in a multi-vendor environment and quickly see that everything is healthy or something is wrong.

Strong opinion here: use a universal monitor, such as BMC, to identify that a problem exists. Then use the specialty tools from the vendor to do final diagnosis and repair. I look at this the same as taking a car to a service garage - any service rep will be able to identify that a problem exists, but I wouldn't want just anyone working on my [insert favorite car - I'm dreaming about a Porsche myself] without factory tools and factory training.

Back to SQL-Backtrack - same concept holds. In a multi-RDBMS-vendor shop, this is the ideal way to go as it >can< provide consistency and might allow non-Oracle specialists to handle routine events. AFAIK, all advanced features they advertise do work as described and are safe. BUT some shops go this route to eliminate [Oracle] specialists, and that I feel is a serious mistake! However, in a 1 or 2 vendor environment, I think it is plain silly to pay extra for something the vendor(s) provide free. Received on Sun Apr 20 2003 - 20:50:47 CDT