DPA 2025.4 Release
SolarWinds is proud to announce the GA release of Database Performance Analyzer (DPA) 2025.4! In this release, you’ll enjoy AI Query Assist for Oracle, a major expansion of DPA Central, and additional SQL Server metrics. DPA is now also available for the first time as a Docker container. Read on for more details on the features included in this DPA release.
DPA 2025.4 Release Notes
AI Query Assist for Oracle
DPA is extending the AI Query Assist to provide intelligent query rewrite for Oracle targets. AI Query Assist for Oracle follows the same UI flow as AI Query Assist for SQL Server. Essentially, the feature is available on the Query Detail page for any DML query that has an execution plan. The query and plan are PII-masked before being sent to SolarWinds AI, which rewrites the query with optimization as its goal.
For relevant queries, you’ll now see AI sparkle icons on the Tuning tab to indicate that a query can be (or has been) submitted for rewrite optimization. Clicking on the icon will take you to the AI Query Assist feature on the Query Detail page.
DPA Central - View My Estate
For organizations running multiple DPA servers, DPA Central delivers a single, consolidated view of high-value monitoring signals across every monitored target - one pane of glass for your entire database estate. The new DPA Central makes it easier to see across your entire database landscape faster, and at enterprise scale.
This release introduces My DB Instances, a new DPA Central tab that lists all targets that the signed-in user is permitted to view. Unlike earlier versions, where users only saw targets with at least one active alarm, users are now provided with a complete, personalized inventory of their registered databases.
Built for very large environments, DPA Central has been optimized for scalability to support estates with thousands of database instances. Actual scale will vary based on the compute resources allocated to your “central” DPA server.
Highlights:
- SAML login support: DPA Central now support SAML authentication, so users logging in to DPA via SAML will see their visible estate in DPA Central.
- Grouped estate view: A familiar, DPA-style home experience that organizes targets for faster triage.
- Custom Properties visibility: See Custom Properties for each monitored target at a glance. This leverages the Custom Properties feature already available in DPA, allowing you to tag each target with properties that describe its use.
- Expanded filtering: Quickly locate the databases you care about with richer search and filter options, including filtering by Custom Property. For example, if you have an “Environment” Custom Property, you could filter to see only your “production” databases.
- Flexible columns: Show and hide base columns and Custom Property columns to tailor your estate view.
- Pagination: Necessary to view a large estate.
Metrics for SQL Server & Azure SQL DB
Azure SQL DB is a popular database platform, exposing a single database that runs alongside other databases in the same Azure cloud instance. DPA now includes an expanded set of metrics that illustrate how Azure SQL DB is performing, covering CPU, disk, memory, sessions and tempDB metric categories.
In addition, 2 tempDB metrics are now being collected for all flavors of SQL Server: tempDB % Free Space and tempDB Size.
tempDB in Real-Time Sessions
In addition to collecting SQL Server tempDB metrics (see above), DPA now exposes tempDB space consumption at a session level. For SQL Server 2016 and above, you will now see the following columns on the Real-Time Sessions page:
- tempdb_user_obj_mb: each session’s tempDB space consumption for user objects
- tempdb_int_obj_mb: each session’s tempDB space consumption for internal objects
What’s next?
If you don't see the features you've been wanting in this release, check out the What We Are Working On for DPA post for what our dedicated database nerds are already looking at. If you don't see everything you've been wishing for there, add it to the Database Performance Analyzer Feature Requests.
