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PLATINUM technology's Enterprise DBA 2.2 earns our Editor's Choice award, providing the greatest range of functions--user administration, schema and content management, and, with its DBVision add-on, database monitoring. Enterprise DBA offered an intuitive common user interface for some (but not all) management tasks, worked with popular RDBMSes and let us distribute the management workload across multiple computers. Enterprise DBA isn't perfect; you must purchase PLATINUM's TSreorg, DBVision and Database Analyzer components to complete most DBA tasks. These tools do not yet share Enterprise DBA's user interface, nor do they support all major databases. Nevertheless, Enterpris
e DBA is the best enterprise-level database management tool of the bunch.
BMC's PATROL series receives Honorable Mention. It offered noteworthy schema and content management tools and monitoring capabilities, but lacked user administration functions. Tivoli's TME 10 let us administer users and monitor databases, but we couldn't manage schemas and content.
PLATINUM technology Enterprise DBA 2.2
 For administering, altering and migrating databases in heterogeneous enterprises, Enterprise DBA 2.2 fared best in our tests as we exercised our multiple Adaptive Server, Oracle and SQL Server databases. The product also worked with DB2 Common Server, but does not yet support DB2 Universal Database. PLATINUM claims Enterprise DBA supports Informix and MVS-DB2 (we didn't test either). The product gave us complete control over users, groups, schemas and content. Some PLATINUM component tools lacked support for one or more of the
major RDBMSes we tested with. This, and the lack of a common interface, were the tools' only flaws.
We also looked at PLATINUM's DBVision monitoring tool, Database Analyzer for Oracle and TSreorg for Oracle and Sybase database defragmenters. These components performed well in our tests, but the additional pricing for each module, which varies by tool, platform and database, is cause for concern.
From a single workstation, we used Enterprise DBA to automatically propagate homogenous and heterogeneous database changes across our test enterprise. The product quickly and accurately migrated schemas and objects between databases at our behest, and it let us create, alter and delete database objects. By using Enterprise DBA's Global Changes feature, we painlessly renamed tables and other objects on an enterprisewide basis. The product let us group these changes into named sets and save them for later reuse, a function we appreciated. BMC's DB-Change Manager also proved adept at schema and content manipulatio
n. TME 10 lacked such tools.
Enterprise DBA impressed us with its ability to centrally perform user and group administration tasks, as well as manage security across our diverse databases. However, TME 10's user administration was easier to use, and the product accomplished enterprisewide user updates quicker than Enterprise DBA.
We also liked Enterprise DBA's ability to perform tasks online or schedule them for later execution. When we presented Enterprise DBA with a particularly complex and onerous database change, the agent running at each database server intelligently examined the change request on that particular server. The agent appropriately determined whether it needed to automatically unload and reload database content as part of the change.
While we used Enterprise DBA to administer users and modify the database, DBVision let us monitor our Adaptive Server, Oracle and SQL Server databases for problems. DBVision, which has a Motif (or Windows NT) GUI different from Enterprise DBA's, also s
upports Informix and DB2 Common Server. In the lab, we configured DBVision to watch for events such as inadequate free space, runaway processes, high CPU utilization and low swap space. DBVision correctly noted every condition we tested.
PLATINUM says DBVision is capable of producing alerts for thousands of database-related events via pager, e-mail or on-screen notifications. BMC's PATROL series similarly monitored myriad events, while TME 10 watched for approximately 300 situations. PLATINUM further claims DBVision can--for some problems--institute corrective action on its own by running a user-supplied script. In the lab, we deliberately caused a low disk space situation on the database server and watched DBVision smoothly correct the problem by running our script for compressing log files and freeing disk space. For other conditions we tested, DBVision promptly informed us of problems by sending e-mail.
We loved Enterprise DBA's support for extended table alters. Administrators often receive requests
to insert columns in the middle of a table or perform other difficult operations affecting a table and its dependencies. Enterprise DBA handled these like a pro across concurrently running Adaptive Server, Oracle and SQL Server databases. We inserted a new column as the third of a 10-column table, then designated the new column to be a foreign key. Enterprise DBA correctly rippled the change across the disparate databases.
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