Hello,
I often see vdba used to create tables and indexes in the development
cycle. Usually by programmers without Unix or dba skills. It gets used
to create and test new vnodes. It would be a pleasant surprise if my
programmers started looking at qeps before they released to production.

I find it effective in tracking sessions, locks and blocks, but I
normally don't run it over my unix production system. I use unix scripts
to keep an eye on system and database health.

I think the performance monitor puts a bit of a load on the server and
it is frustrating when the "background refresh" pops up in the
foreground blocking any other activity. I prefer:

while /bin/true; do
Sleep 10
iisess -rq #show me running queries
Done

Paul


-----Original Message-----
From: info-ingres-admin (AT) cariboulake (DOT) com
[mailto:info-ingres-admin (AT) cariboulake (DOT) com] On Behalf Of Roy Hann
Sent: Friday, 23 September 2005 9:18 PM
To: info-ingres (AT) cariboulake (DOT) com
Subject: [Info-ingres] Re: What do you use VDBA for?

"Steve McElhinney" <stevem (AT) 141 (DOT) com> wrote

I can say with considerable confidence that practically nobody uses it
in the real world. It is nice for displaying QEPs and that is all.
Unfortunately that is something that is of more use to programmers than
DBAs and programmers can't get the privileges to use it. I have visited
over a hundred Ingres sites and I have never seen VDBA actively used at
any of them. Someone might once in a while use the table size
calculator, but whoop-do-doo.

I suspect the main reasons no one uses it is because it can only be used
effectively once you have already mastered the command line utilities,
and you can't script or automate anything in it.

It's no help with any of that. It's a GUI, and GUIs are interactive.
You want automation. For that you need to look at rolling your own with
IMA, use Unicenter, or best of all, use DMT's DBAnalyzer.

Nothing.

Not sure what to say here. Any development effort needed to make it
useful would be a waste IMO.

Not that I've ever seen. Does anyone remember Steve Caswell? Back when
he was president of the NAIUA we attended a meeting where CA showed us
the early prototype. To say we were underwhelmed would be an
exaggeration.
Steve was incandescent at the idea of pouring scarce development dollars
into something so transparently useless. (Of course that was nothing
compared with the staggering spending-spree that went into developing
something even more obviously useless at around the same time, but let's
not reopen that wound.)

Happily CA now has something called the Ingres Product Advisory Council,
which gets the chance to comment on these kinds of misplaced enthusiasms
before they do too much damage. Looking back over the years, the people
on it have pretty good record of spotting the stinkers very early on.

Roy


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Some of us who have grown up with GUIs use it

As programmers though it's mainly just to test some SQL or look up
information on tables etc. Toad for Oracle seems a bit more user-friendly
though.

Dean

Roy Hann wrote on 23/09/2005 12:18:17:


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