But wait… is there more than one way to skin a cat? Kyle Hailey thinks so, and he’s not afraid to let Jonathan know it!
Kyle’s fancy footwork will include his own approach to Visual SQL Tuning (VST) with some ring side support from DB Optimizer XE. Hitting below the belt? You be the judge.

Live! June 10, 2010 at 11AM Pacific

About the Contenders:

Jonathan Lewis
Consultant, Speaker and Author

Jonathan Lewis has been working in the IT industry for nearly 25 years, and has been using the Oracle RDBMS for more than 20. For the last 16 years he has been working as a freelance consultant, often spending only one or two days at a time with any client to address critical performance problems. Jonathan is also renowned throughout the world (having visited 42 countries at the last count) for his tutorials and seminars. He was a founding member of the Oak Table network, and one of the first individuals to be contacted by Oracle University for their "Celebrity Seminar" events. He also writes regularly for the UKOUG magazine, and occasionally for other publications around the world. In the limited amount of time he has left over, Jonathan also publishes high-tech Oracle articles on his blog at jonathanlewis.wordpress.com.

Kyle Hailey
Program Manager, Database Performance and Optimization Products
Embarcadero Technologies

Kyle Hailey has been in the industry for a decade and a half and working with Oracle for over 13 years, having spent time in support, porting, benchmarking, and kernel development at Oracle. After creating tools to improve high-end performance monitoring such as direct SGA attach and interactive graphic displays of performance data, he recently redesigned the Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g performance pages to be graphically oriented and wait-interface centric. He now works at Embarcadero on their suite of performance tuning and monitoring tools. He is a member of the Oak Table and co-author of Oracle insights: Tales of the Oak Table. He is also a regular speaker at Hotsos, NoCOUG, RMOUG, NYOUG, Oracle World and Dbforum and he teaches classes around the world on Oracle performance tuning.

Embarcadero Technologies, long known for providing premium database design, development and management tools for all major database platforms, is unveiling a new line of database products that carry an XE brand. Embarcadero XE products incorporate three distinguishing features – deep, native support across all major databases with a consistent user interface, centralized license management and on-demand tool access via Embarcadero® ToolCloud™, and an easy upgrade path to Embarcadero® All-Access™ XE.

“So now, we are not only changing how premium database tools are sold, we are transforming how IT organizations can manage, provision and access those tools so they can optimize their technology spend and improve efficiency.”

XE products represent a fundamental shift in the database tools market. Leading vendors, including Embarcadero, have historically offered tools with feature support for multiple databases, but support for each database was sold separately. With Embarcadero’s XE line, support for all database types is included with each product. Embarcadero is also the only vendor providing ToolCloud technology with its products.

“With today’s increasingly complex, heterogeneous database environments, organizations need to maximize the capabilities of IT staff and leverage opportunities for greater automation, efficiency and scale,” said Will Cappelli, research vice president, Gartner. “While domain-specific database tools help meet some of these challenges, companies need to consider how easily these tools can be accessed and managed or their sought-after operational benefits may be limited.”

“We are meeting the challenges of complex IT environments by making it more cost-effective to equip IT staff with the tools they need, while simultaneously making those tools easier to manage,” said Michael Swindell, senior vice president of marketing and products for Embarcadero. “So now, we are not only changing how premium database tools are sold, we are transforming how IT organizations can manage, provision and access those tools so they can optimize their technology spend and improve efficiency.”

Embarcadero XE products are distinguished by the following capabilities:

• Heterogeneous database support: Each XE product includes deep, native database platform and version support for all major databases, including Oracle®, Microsoft SQL Server®, DB2®, Sybase®, MySQL® and more with each product providing a consistent user interface across database platforms.
• Embarcadero ToolCloud-enabled: XE products provide users with on-demand, “zero-install” access to tools, along with centralized license management, which streamline the access, administration and provisioning of tool licenses for organizations with multiple users.
• All-Access upgradeable: Embarcadero products can be upgraded to All-Access XE, a complete, on-demand tool chest for architects, DBAs and developers working in heterogeneous database environments.

Prior to Embarcadero’s new XE product line, data management professionals had two unfavorable options – using rudimentary ODBC/JDBC-based database tools that only provided generic feature support, or using platform-specific tools from database vendors or third-party tool vendors for native feature support and control. Embarcadero’s new XE tools overcome the shortcomings of these options by incorporating deep, native support for all major databases within a single tool, enabling users to extend their skills across both single platform and heterogeneous environments. Inclusion of support for all databases reduces licensing, training and operational costs.

“In the past, a customer would be identified as an Oracle shop or a SQL Server shop, but today’s IT organizations need to manage various types of databases,” added Swindell. “Our new XE products ensure they’re prepared for whatever database comes in front of them.”

XE products also incorporate Embarcadero’s ToolCloud technology. ToolCloud centralizes and simplifies tool licensing and provisioning and gives users click-and-run access to tools via Embarcadero™ InstantOn™ capabilities. This enables users to access the tools they need on-demand with full fidelity and performance and without complex installations.

Embarcadero’s initial introduction of XE products is part of a larger companywide initiative that involves extending the XE brand and capabilities across its data modeling and application development tools later this year. Meanwhile, Embarcadero’s initial line of XE tools include:

• All-Access XE – The industry’s only on-demand heterogeneous tool chest
• DB Change Manager XE – A tool for simplifying, automating and reporting on database changes
• DB Optimizer XE – A tool for heterogeneous database SQL profiling, tuning and monitoring
• DBArtisan® XE – A tool for heterogeneous database administration
• Rapid SQL® XE – A heterogeneous SQL integrated development environment (IDE)

Pricing and Availability

Five Embarcadero XE tools are now available at varying starting prices. Pricing for All-Access XE begins at $2,995, pricing for DB Change Manager XE begins at $795, pricing for DB Optimizer XE begins at $795, pricing for DBArtisan XE begins at $4,995 and pricing for Rapid SQL XE begins at $1,495. All pricing is in U.S. dollars.

About Embarcadero Technologies

Embarcadero Technologies, Inc. is the leading provider of software tools that empower application developers and data management professionals to design, build and run applications and databases more efficiently in heterogeneous IT environments. Over 90 of the Fortune 100 and an active community of more than three million users worldwide rely on Embarcadero’s award-winning products to optimize costs, streamline compliance, and accelerate development and innovation. Founded in 1993, Embarcadero is headquartered in San Francisco with offices located around the world. Embarcadero is online at www.embarcadero.com.

Embarcadero, the Embarcadero Technologies logos and all other Embarcadero Technologies product or service names are trademarks or registered trademarks of Embarcadero Technologies, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

As any database admin knows, mastering the subtler nuances of SQL can be likened to the black arts. For me, tuning the efficiency of SQL queries on large, heavily used databases is a perfect example.

Sure, I know how to use the query analysis tools built into SQL Server and Oracle — but even with them, optimizing SQL still requires me to monitor queries during heavy load to find out whether I’ve truly fixed the code, without introducing new problems in the process.

[ Keep up with app dev issues and trends with InfoWorld's Fatal Exception [1] and Strategic Developer [2] ]

Last week Kyle Hailey of Embarcadero gave me a live demo of DB Optimizer 2 [3] and made it very clear how I or any database programmer could use the DB Optimizer to methodically analyze, improve, and load test SQL queries. Two of the tools introduced in this package are Visual SQL Tuning Diagrams and Index Analysis. The package also includes sophisticated profiling and parallel load stress testing. The figure below shows profiling (click on it to see a full-size screen):

[4]

The next figure shows Visual SQL Tuning index analysis:

[5]

The query optimization that Kyle used as a demonstration was from a major package that shall remain nameless to protect the guilty.

I have to say, I was very impressed. I’m not sure exactly how big a shop you have to be to rationalize a $1,500 tool like this, but the ROI for optimizing a query versus throwing bigger hardware at it is usually easy to justify.

Interested admins can view a video demonstration of DB Optimizer 2 [6] on Embarcadero’s Web site.

By Martin Heller

Created 2009-11-09 03:00AM