Re: What do you use VDBA for?

"Steve McElhinney" <stevem@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1127468079.588035.180710@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> I was wondering what real-world uses there are for visual DBA?

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.

> 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...?

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.

> What do you use VDBA for?

Nothing.

> How much development effort was needed?

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

> Is it just a 'pet project' or does it really save time/effort
> or provide tangible benefit for the business?

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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