PLATINUM, BMC & Tivoli Bring Enterprise Database Management Down To Earth

We centrally defined the users and roles that we wanted to broadcast to all databases. At the database server, the local smart agent compared the current user definitions with our change request and automatically generated the correct SQL statements. Triggering the change was child's play. We simply selected the distribution for the user changes from a menu. Alternatively, we dragged the icon for the profile onto the target database group in the desktop window. In either case, we scheduled the change for immediate or deferred action. We also set up validation rules through TME 10's policies, which let us control duplicate user names, password aging and the required length and content of passwords. TME 10 also let us securely delegate administrative tasks. In our tests, we identified assistants and assigned different privilege levels and database groupings (profiles) to them. We designated an experienced DBA as the database owner responsible for production servers, while putting a trainee DBA in charge of test environment servers. Barry Nance, a computer analyst and consultant for 25 years, is the author of Introduction to Networking, 4th Edition (Que, 1997), Using OS/2 Warp (Que, 1994), and Client/Server LAN programming (Que, 1994). He can be reached at barryn@bix.com.
	How We Tested In The Lab To test these enterprise database management tools, we created a simulacrum of a global network in our lab. Although most of these products r un on MVS, various Unix flavors and OS/2, we chose Windows NT Server because it gave us a level playing field for comparing features, usability and performance. Three Gateway 2000 NS-8000 computers with 333-MHz Pentium II dual processors, 512 MB of RAM and two 9-GB SCSI RAID drives acted as our database servers. Our management console was a Gateway 2000 NS-7000 with a 333-MHz Pentium II, 512 MB of RAM and three 4.2-GB SCSI SCA RAID drives. Our network consisted of a 100-MHz Fast Ethernet LAN with one T1 WAN linked to another small LAN and two dial-up 33.3-Kbps modem connections. The 25 database client PCs included a mixture of NT Workstation, Windows95, OS/2 Warp and Macintosh System 7 platforms. The database servers ran Adaptive Server Enterprise 11.5, DB2 Universal Database 5.0, Oracle7.3 and SQL Server 6.5. We ran each test multiple times, using various mixtures of the same database on different servers, as well as different databases on the three servers. This approach let us evaluate the tools in both homogenous and heterogeneous environments. Although these tools also support Informix and MVS-DB2, we didn't perform tests with these databases: Informix declined to participate and our lab doesn't have a mainframe on which to run the MVS version of DB2.

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