I was wondering what real-world uses there are for visual DBA?

I am thinking in terms of monitoring large, reasonably stable,
production systems, monitoring the dbms servers, acp, rcp processes
etc.
Warning us if the transaction logfile is filling up or if there
is locking contention...?

What do you use VDBA for?
How much development effort was needed?
Is it just a 'pet project' or does it really save time/effort
or provide tangible benefit for the business?

TIA
Steve
(Ingres 2.5 & 2.6, AIX)

"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

On 2005-09-23, Steve McElhinney <stevem (AT) 141 (DOT) com> wrote:
We use it to diagnose locking problems, and for quick inspections.
Most of our engineers only have GUI experience; without something like
VDBA, it would have been very hard to actually get them to use Ingres.
I'm the only command-line weenie in my team.

That's not to say that VDBA doesn't need improvement -- does it ever!
It's unintuitive, complex, and (a cardinal sin if CA is serious about
going head-to-head with SQL Server) ugly as hell. But a welcome
addition to the stack of tools nonetheless.

--
Emiliano

Emiliano wrote:

Come to think of it, we use it for more than just quick inspections. We
use unicode databases, and text fields come out in some sort of hex form
in the command line client (at least on Windows), while VDBA displays
data in readable format. So VDBA is actually quite important to us.

Emiliano