Re: DBA Tool Experiences

Jim Sauceman <jsaucem1_at_utk.edu> wrote:

>If you have used any DBA-type tools such as Platinum's Desktop DBA,
>TSREORG, BMC Patrol, or any Oracle Montoring tools, I would appreciate
>hearing your comments. We are looking at purchasing some tools to make
>Tablespace Management and Performance Tuning easier and would like to
>hear from the experts. Thanks in advance.
>
>Jim Sauceman
>University of Tennessee
>jsaucem1_at_utk.edu
>

Jim,

Since Oracle Enterprise Manager (without Performance Pack) is free it is useful as a GUI management tool kit (as a replacement for command line querying). The Storage Manager is particularly useful for tablespace management but doesn't give anything more than what a series of command line queries can. We found the repository to be difficult to use. Without PP (needs to be purchased) it cannot be used for Performance Monitoring.

Platinum's Desktop DBA puts a convenient GUI face on certain DBA activities such as login and object manipulation and stands out when used in a multiple database/RDBMS vendor environment. Some examples of features not found in OEM: displaying which users have what permissions PER object, allowing me (as DBA) to grant priviledges to other users on someone elses objects (I didn't think this could be done!), copying objects across databases, etc.

We have recently purchased BMC Patrol (over Platinum's DBVision and OEM PP) as our performance monitoring tool. It provides info on not only Oracle but of the underlying OS as well. It excels at monitoring and reporting but has limited control/tuning capabilities. Caveat: it gives a tremendous amount of data, knowing how to use it is not as simple as point-and-click, novices to UNIX and Oracle may have a steep learning curve due to information overload.

We use the OEM manager programs and Patrol as our DBA tools. We do occasionally use D'DBA because we have dozens of Oracle and Sybase databases. BMC also offers DBReorg which we have purchased but not had a chance to use yet.

I'd be interested to hear other feedback....

Michael Santoianni
Database Administrator
Duke University
msanto_at_duke.edu Received on Mon Jan 12 1998 - 00:00:00 CET