Database Performance Analyzer 9.1 Release Candidate is available now!!!!

The Database Performance Analyzer team has been very hard at work to provide you with some great features that will not only help you with your current monitoring; Database Performance Analyzer is now in the Amazon cloud.  This RC for DPA 9.1 is now available in the Customer Portal to download for customers on active maintenance through March 31, 2015.  The RC can be installed on your production system.  For any questions or comments, we'd love to hear your feedback at Database Performance Analyzer RC

What are these New Features, you ask?

• DPA is in the Amazon Cloud
  • Amazon Machine Image (AMI) for DPA
  • Monitor Amazon RDS instances for Oracle and SQL Server
• New Features
  • Annotations
  • Updated Oracle Plans
  • Exclude SQL statements
  • 64 bit installation
• Updated Licensing - everything is instance based

DPA Available in Amazon

Now if you are thinking of moving to the cloud, DPA can move with you.

• • Deploy DPA in less than 2 minutes and you are ready to start monitoring.
  • You can monitor database instances that are both on the cloud and on-premise.
  • Monitor MSSQL Server, Oracle, DB2, SAP ASE (formally Sybase) running on Amazon's EC2 instances as well!!

You will have to wait a bit to see and enjoy this feature, it won't be available initially for RC, stayed tuned for dates.

Register Amazon RDS instances

You can now register a RDS instance, SQL Server and Oracle, just like on-premise.

RDS is Amazons version of a DBaaS or database as a service.  Because it is a service, we have had to adjust DPA so we can collect as much as the same as we do with on-premise instances.  There are a few items not available, mostly around metrics and alerts.  You can always explore and add additional metrics through Custom Metrics and additional alerts through Custom Alerts.  See the Administrators guide for more detail.

Annotations for Database Events

Have you ever wanted to track performance before and after you added an index or deployed code?  Now you can!  Add comments directly in the timeline within DPA, providing an easy method log changes to  SQL code, database configuration, and server resources for future reference. You can choose to have these annotations included when you select to mail the screen making it easy to share your findings.

Detailed Oracle Plan Display

The new Oracle plan display from the Plan text tab enhances your insights into the inner workings of a plan including Predicates and an updated tree display.  You can see that there are magnifying glass icons on the screen.  When that icon is selected, you will see the associated predicates as well as the type of predicate (access or filter).

Exclude SQL Display from Trend Charts

We are happy to bring our number one customer requested enhancement to a feature in DPA! With the Exclude SQL feature, you can mask SQL statements from the month and day trend views, letting you focus on less significant statements in the vertical bar graphs, that were previously dwarfed by one or more statements that take significantly more time.

Now that runaway SQL won't dominate your trend screen all you have to do is select a SQL from the legend on the right of the graph

Click the check box 'Exclude this SQL from Performance-side Trend charts' and the graph is refreshed without that pesky SQL.

Once one SQL is excluded you will know by looking at the bottom of the trend graph and seeing 'There are SQL Statements that may have been excluded from this chart. View Excluded SQL'

Default Install is 64 Bit Software

I am very happy to announce that DPA now defaults to a 64 bit installation.  Never fear, if you still need a 32 bit installer, you just need to contact our support team!

Updated Licensing

Many of you have had to go through new processes that in some cases were a bit odd and confusing before DPA 9.1. We have addressed all this confusion by fully going to instance based licensing in DPA 9.1.  You will need to go to your portal to download new keys for the RC and later for GA.  However, all these keys are now in the portal which means no more calls to support to help find the key(s).

So the obvious next question is 'How I can download the RC'?

To download the DPA 9.1 RC, just log into the Portal to get your DPA RC 9.1 bits and your RC license keys here.

Again, if you have any questions or just want to chat about how great this RC is, head over to Database Performance Analyzer RC area.

Thank you very much for your participation.  We are looking forward to hearing from you!!

What's next for DPA?  You can review our What We Are Working on post AND this Beta blog post on DPA with Orion integration work.