Re: Spotlight on Oracle by Quest

Hi Ana

Bought and used it at a previous place I worked. It does have a novel approach to presenting a complete instance view on the main screen and highlighting problem areas (flashing red IIRC). So in a few seconds you could see if things were running 'normally' (allowed you to define through capture what 'normal' was).

We were in a position where we needed to be able to give a very quick answer as to whether the DB was the location for performance issues in a multi-tiered multi-party environment - it was usually a front-end system causing the problems, but we had to be able to give an authorative answer quickly.

So for this environment it was worth the money, not sure if I would use it in less performance critical environments (ie where you are given minutes rather than seconds to see how your instance is performing) as general tools (eg TOAD), Oracle Enterprise Manager, roll-your-own SQL scripts and others (eg the very handy PERL DBTOP script) are good enough and cheaper.

One other drawback is that the version we were working with didn't keep a history. I think if you continued to run it interactively it would log alerts but you could not do retrospective drill-down etc. Another tool we had which is slightly more aimed to SQL tuning but provided some instance tuning capabilities was Precise. This had the benefit of full retrospective logging allowing you to answer questions like 'Why was overnight processing slow two days ago' which you could not answer with Spotlight. Another factor with these tools is the amount of load they themselves place and Precise was better than Spotlight in this regard too (it directly reads the SGA shared memory segment structures rather than going through the dynamic SQL tables layers).

For info, their sales people used to be able to provide a time-limited trial license key allowing you to try before you buy

HTH KJP Ana C. Dent wrote:
> Is Spotlight on Oracle by Quest a useful product?
> Is it worth the license fee?
> I'd like feedback from folks who are using it
> or who looked at it & decided not to use it.
>
Received on Sun Dec 07 2003 - 04:16:11 CST