Quest Software Inc. has announced the newest edition of Spotlight on Oracle, a desktop-based monitoring and diagnostics tool that provides visibility into Oracle database processes and performance. Spotlight exposes current and future performance problems, ensuring that database administrators (DBAs) remain a step ahead of database issues that can negatively impact applications, users, customers, and business operations.
The latest version (v6) extends Spotlight's predictive diagnostic capabilities by identifying impending bottlenecks. The new version also enhances predictive diagnostics for SQL when execution plans change or performance trends are inconsistent. With these new and enhanced capabilities, DBAs are more productive and gain added value from the tools they already own.
Guy Harrison, chief architect for Spotlight on Oracle, tells 5 Minute Briefing that "in version 5, Quest engineered the ability to track performance of SQL statements over time and statistically predict how this statement performance will change. In version 6, we have extended that diagnostic capability to predicting performance bottlenecks that can be caused by such things as serialization points in the database or latch/lock SQL contentions." These hard-to-find bottlenecks can account for up to 80% of performance issues and can now be quickly resolved via an intuitive GUI that provides instant visual comprehension of the problems causing the bottlenecks.
The new version also features enhanced diagnostics for archiving. As archiving has become more complex-with different types of archive locations, mandatory and optional destinations, and minimums-it has also become increasingly difficult to monitor and manage. Spotlight simplifies the task by calculating time to failure, raising alerts when an archive destination or the archive process fails (or will soon fail), and providing a consolidated view of archive activity and health.
Spotlight on Oracle is offered in three different editions: Standard, Professional, and Xpert. The Standard Edition enables DBAs to identify and diagnose thousands of performance issues, and automatically set baselines, thresholds and alerts. The Professional Edition offers all of the Standard Edition's capabilities plus OS diagnostics to quickly correct performance problems associated with various operating systems, as well as all of the predictive diagnostic capabilities mentioned earlier. The Xpert Edition includes everything from the other two Editions plus automated SQL tuning and diagnostics for Oracle RAC (Real Application Cluster) environments.
For more information about Quest Spotlight on Oracle, go here. For more information about Quest Software, Inc., go here.