Skip to main content

New cool Quest Tools

By
Yesterday evening guys from Quest presented their latest cool new tools at one of our company locations. They started with Foglight, a tool for Application Management. Using that tool you can see on one page the status of the applications that are running, where users experience some problems (based on thresholds), the number of users affected and where in the application stack the problem occurs. With a few clicks you can drill down to the actual origin of the problem. Foglight supports a number of application types (like Java, .Net, Siebel, SAP), different types of access (o.a. Apache, Citrix, Rich Clients), multiple infrastructures (Windows, Solaris, HP/UX, VMWare) and different databases (SQL Server and - of course - Oracle).
Foglight uses so called "Quest Collectors" on the web-, application- and databaseservers to sample data. That data is collected in the Foglight Management Server. Apart from that you can use an Experience Monitor and Viewer as a network sniffer.
Quest claims it is an end-to-end performance management tool, but actually the scope is somewhat limited to "just" the servers: storage is not included and for network management there is only a diagnosis and no suggested solution.
Foglight is complementary to Spotlight that has been around much longer. Spotlight is also a very nice graphical tool, but is - much more - limited to only one database instance.
Of course everything has it's price. This cool tool costs around 500 euro per CPU socket. A 'normal' implementation will cost you 20 - 200 kEuro (+ 18% support fee a year).
Also some new features of good old TOAD (v10) where addressed, like the enhanced ER Diagrammer, a new sort of Data Grid (with grouping, colors, hide/display columns etc.), an enhanced Data Generator - that can generate sample data with taking care of referential integrity and Unicode support. All the details are on www.toadworld.com.
The last product they showed was Foglight Performance Analyzer, a tool that has overlapping functionality with AWR, ASH and ADDM (but then without the Oracle Diagnostic and Tuning Packs license). The analyzer uses a StealthCollect memory tool to detect changes to the Oracle memory stack (without having an Oracle connection!) and offloads these changes to a data warehouse. So you can analyze and query the use and changes of your Oracle DB, without actually using the DB itself. Also tracking errors or dumps when the database itself is down is a nice functionality.
All in all a nice informative evening, with lots of tools that I definitely would like to try in a real environment (now I have to find a customer who uses or needs this sort of stuff).

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Filtering in the APEX Interactive Grid

By
Remember Oracle Forms? One of the nice features of Forms was the use of GLOBAL items. More or less comparable to Application Items in APEX. These GLOBALS where often used to pre-query data. For example you queried Employee 200 in Form A, then opened Form B and on opening that Form the Employee field is filled with that (GLOBAL) value of 200 and the query was executed. So without additional keys strokes or entering data, when switching to another Form a user would immediately see the data in the same context. And they loved that. In APEX you can create a similar experience using Application Items (or an Item on the Global Page) for Classic Reports (by setting a Default Value to a Search Item) and Interactive Reports (using the  APEX_IR.ADD_FILTER  procedure). But what about the Interactive Grid? There is no APEX_IG package ... so the first thing we have to figure out is how can we set a filter programmatically? Start with creating an Interactive Grid based upon the good old Employ
1 comment
Read more

apex_application.g_f0x array processing in Oracle 12

By
If you created your own "updatable reports" or your custom version of tabular forms in Oracle Application Express, you'll end up with a query that looks similar to this one: then you disable the " Escape special characters " property and the result is an updatable multirecord form. That was easy, right? But now we need to process the changes in the Ename column when the form is submitted, but only if the checkbox is checked. All the columns are submitted as separated arrays, named apex_application.g_f0x - where the "x" is the value of the "p_idx" parameter you specified in the apex_item calls. So we have apex_application.g_f01, g_f02 and g_f03. But then you discover APEX has the oddity that the "checkbox" array only contains values for the checked rows. Thus if you just check "Jones", the length of g_f02 is 1 and it contains only the empno of Jones - while the other two arrays will contain all (14) rows. So for
Post a Comment
Read more

Stop using validations for checking constraints !

By
 If you run your APEX application - like a Form based on the EMP table - and test if you can change the value of Department to something else then the standard values of 10, 20, 30 or 40, you'll get a nice error message like this: But it isn't really nice, is it? So what do a lot of developers do? They create a validation (just) in order to show a nicer, better worded, error message like "This is not a valid department".  And what you then just did is writing code twice : Once in the database as a (foreign key) check constraint and once as a sql statement in your validation. And we all know : writing code twice is usually not a good idea - and executing the same query twice is not enhancing your performance! So how can we transform that ugly error message into something nice? By combining two APEX features: the Error Handling Function and the Text Messages! Start with copying the example of an Error Handling Function from the APEX documentation. Create this function
Post a Comment
Read more