DB Artisan
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Anyone else using this product??? I am using version 8.1.2 and I have to say it is extremely comprehensive and is excellent in my shop where we have MS SQL Server, Oracle 8i & 10g, and DB2.
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This was removed by the editor as SPAM
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Yes, we are using DB Artisan for Sybase and have tried it for MS SQL Server too. It's a good tool.
We are currently considering Performance Center for proactive monitoring. Any experience or feedback on this product? Or any other recommended tools for Sybase & MS SQL Server environments?
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I have been using dbartisan for about 4-5 years now thru various releases and consider it to be an excellent product. Pretty much able to get what I need done without resorting to running scripts. Find some bits to be confusing, but there is usually a way to get around most barriers. Also use ChangeManager is the best way I know of to keep database objects in synch.
Never had time to take in any training on the beast, but wish I did
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I have used this product for 5-6 years now and it is doing good. we have license for Oracle, Sybase and SQL Server. The maint things that we think is a problem is that it doesn't know how to handle SQL Server 2005. Well I am a SQL Server DBA so I don't use it againt any other product. With the new release license I heard it would be able to handle 2005 but there is another question about the license cost.
mom
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The latest release does indeed handle 2005. There were some questions about some late breaking changes to Vista and Longhorn which delayed things evidently.
Performance Center was an option we looked at, however, I received information that Performance Center will most likely be wrapped up inside DB Artisan in the relatively near future so took a pass on that product.
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We have it here and have for about 4 years. We use it for minor SQL Server things, ease of use for some Oracle stuff and DB2 Unix admin. Some MF DB2 sometimes too. We really like it. I use it quite a bit for some things that Oracle Ent. Manager does not do... rebuild indexes on the fly... ease of use for modifying tbls... easier to add pri. keys/indexes too. Some dbs' that have a handful of schemas it is easier to analyze in Artisan.
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I have actually been using their (embarcadero) products for many years now. I have become increasingly disappointed with their quality control over time. The latest versions I upgraded too have caused numerous problems for me and I had 6 bug reports within 2 months of using them. I cannot even use their products at one of my clients that has a lot of databases on a single server. And I ONLY do sql server, so their multiplatform capabilities are useless for me.
Best,
Kevin G. Boles
SQL Server Consultant
SQL MVP 2007-2012
TheSQLGuru on googles mail service -
Just make sure you report the bugs to Embarcadero - the are normally incredibly responsive, so I'd be surprised if a bug report were ignored.
Karen
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where did you hear about Performance Center being integrated with DB Artisan? I just did an evaluation of it and a comparison with Quest's Spotlight. It would seem silly to drop $20k on Spotlight if Performance Center is going to be free, even though IMHO it's an inferior product.
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I work for a major investment bank and we use DBArtisan on Sybase ASE to an extent. It does the job very well but is one of the buggiest apps I've ever used, (even compared to Windows :p). We (developers) have been barred from using it on production databases as it does such a bad job of handling errors - leaving code running when it should've been cancelled - code still running when you're not even in the application anymore etc.
That combined with pretty poor GUI mgmt (have you ever clicked on a button on DBArtisan and it doesn't capture the click but you end up clicking on a window which is behind DBArtisan!?!?!) - it's quite an interesting concept lol. Not to mention the guaranteed crash whenever you close the application down.... clean exit anyone? Never with DBArtisan.
All said and done, it's still a brilliant tool and I put up with the above annoyances and use this instead of isql / SQL Advantage and I don't generally use much of the other fancy functionality within the tool (Performance centre etc which I think someones already mentioned).
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I got the information from my sales guy at Embarcadero after a quarterly meeting happened. If you look at DB Artisan you will notice that the different views in the application are actually web pages and it makes even more sense. The word from Embarcadero at the time was that was the direction the engineers wanted to move in so don't be surprised if you see Performance Center disappear sometime in the coming years.
I have SpotLight from Quest but I have found it to be less than what I need (really, none of those monitors does what I need) so I fell back on DB Artisan and multiple monitors on my desktop which gives me the best of both worlds. I am in the process of discontinuing my license(s) from Quest it works so well.
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I have used it for nearly 5 years (SQL server 6.5/7.0/2000/2005 and Sybase). Some features are pretty handy. But the history report part is not as good as they advertised.
SQL server 2005 has some build-in features/functions which are much better than 3rd party tools.
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Christopher Robin (5/5/2007)
Performance Center was an option we looked at, however, I received information that Performance Center will most likely be wrapped up inside DB Artisan in the relatively near future so took a pass on that product.I think your information may be either outdated, or a rumor.
Performance Center is still a product on its own (in fact the 2.0.3 release is pending - with support for DB2 v9 as the main adding) and I don't think it will be integrated inside DBArtisan in the next 24 months.
Cristian Amarie
Performance Center development team
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I have a real love/hate relationship with DBArtisan. On the one hand, there's nothing like it for useful features. On the other the bugs are embarassingly bad. I'm currently running 8.5.5 to which I upgraded because the earlier version would scramble source code in the editor, an utterly unforgivable bug. The new version is less buggy, but I really have to wonder what the Embarcadero developers are smoking because I'd be ashamed of being associated with it. In additions to bugs others have mentione, here are a couple of my "favorite" examples:
The editing keys (copy, insert, etc.) are inconsistent between windows. Need to copy some code out of a stored procedure window into an iSQL window? Ctrl-C doesn't work in the source code window. It does everywhere else. Moreover, this changed from the earlier version. Get this right and lock it down. Don't go all Microsoft by "improving" basic function from version to version.
Speaking of editing, if you want to copy some results out of an ad-hoc query so as to insert it into Excel, well, that's hit-or-miss. Sometimes you get the data in columns, sometimes you get it as concatenated strings. I could be doing something wrong but, somehow, I doubt it.
Don't try search and replace in a script extract window. That results in an endless loop behavior with shutdown the only option.
Would it be too much to ask to put a Copy selection on the right-click context menu? Jeez, everyone else does this why not DBArtisan?
Then there's the incredibly useful data unload and load feature. I'm not being sarcastic here, it's damned useful. But I've learned the hard way not to dump to comma-separated files, the load feature can't read them!
I live in a Sybase world and while I actually like Sybase (don't even ask me about the miserable Sybase GUI tool, it's even worse), I long for the stability of the new SQL Server Management Studio. Compared to DBArtisan, it's rock-solid.
These issues may seem small, but when the query you've been tweaking for the last hour is lost in some window that's now inaccessable because DBArtisan has lost it, one tends to become very upset very quickly.
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