DBSophic's Corporate Blog

DBSophic Releases Qure version 1.5, featuring full trial capabilities

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 13:57:00 +0000

DBSophic released Qure version 1.5, the latest version of its flagship database performance optimization solution.

The new version features new full trial capabilities. It can be downloaded from DBSophic website - free of charge. The trial version presents multiple benefits. It performs a quick, yet thorough, analysis of the database, and provides a clear view of database activities, sorted by their resource consumption - Duration, CPU and I/O.

Qure's free trial provides accurate measurements of the improvement potential for all analyzed activities, and a sample of the generated recommendations for several activities allowing the user to experience Qure's ease of use and effectiveness.

Qure 1.5 presents additional features such as enhanced UI, additional performance optimizations and improved analysis performance. Users of Qure v1.2 will notice that the benchmark process has now been integrated into the analysis process.

Qure's new features allow users to quickly pinpoint and optimize the performance of the most resource-consuming activities, thus providing improved application users' experience and reducing hardware bottlenecks.

Qure Improves SuperDerivatives’ SQL Server Database Performance by Over 50%

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 13:28:00 +0000

Qure Improves SuperDerivatives' SQL Server Database Performance by Over 50%

SuperDerivatives, a leading provider of multi-asset derivatives pricing, revaluation and management tools worldwide, uses DBSophic's Qure solution to optimize its SQL Server databases.

SuperDerivatives, which combines pricing for a wide range of instruments and underlying assets with front office and risk management tools delivered over the web, has dozens of SQL Server databases. These databases provide service to thousands of customers in over 60 countries, including Deloitte & Touche, Standard & Poor's, The Wallis Group and more.

SuperDerivatives decided to deploy Qure in order to maintain the performance of the databases and applications in the organization's production environment.

SuperDerivatives used Qure to analyze over 20 different databases and the results exceeded the expectations of the company's database administrators.

In one occasion, SuperDerivatives performed two Qure analyses on their large and complex foreign exchange database. Recommendations from the first analysis were implemented on SuperDerivatives' production environment and provided over 50% improvement across all measures (Duration, CPU and I/O).

A second analysis was executed several months later on the same database, which contained the implemented recommendations from the first analysis. The performance improvement results across the improved batches sorted by duration were VERY positive and reflected the effectiveness of Qure and its capabilities.

Read the Full SuperDerivatives Case Study

Retalix implements Qure’s recommendations to optimize performance of business transactions

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 12:19:00 +0000

Retalix (RTLX on NASDAQ), a global provider of integrated software solutions for the food, fuel, and consumer goods retail and distribution industries, has used DBSophic's flagship product, Qure, to optimize key business transactions.

The analysis process at Retalix, was not induced by a specific performance problem, but rather as part of an ongoing effort to maintain database and applications performance. The company puts much effort into maintaining clients' database performance in order to preserve applications' high level of service and data availability.

As the company works to maintain database performance while continuously adding new features and business models to its applications, these additions can potentially degrade performance on top of the increase in data and user volumes.

Retalix focuses on business transactions end-to-end and has used such methods to measure the performance gain after implementing Qure's recommendation. The company didn't look at the database tier only, but measured the transactions across all tiers of the application.

Qure optimized the performance of Retalix's Grocery product line and generated hundreds of performance optimization recommendations. Accordingly, Retalix concentrated on a subset of application's key business transactions and implemented recommendations only within the database itself without making changes to other application tiers.

Israel's largest HMO installs DBSophic's software solution to increase operational efficiency

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 08:26:00 +0000

Clalit Health Services, Israel's largest health maintenance organization (HMO) has successfully completed the installation of DBSophic's flagship software solution, Qure, which optimizes SQL Server databases performance.

Clalit officials noted that by deploying the Qure solution it has managed to significantly improve database effectiveness, increase operational efficiency and reduce staff time spent on fixing performance problems. Users at the HMO reported better response times and a much improved user experience. Timeouts stopped occurring after implementing the Qure recommendations. Additional databases were analyzed with Qure after that and got similar improvement results.

The improvements have translated into a real reduction in Clalit's overall IT costs and helped improve the service provided to close to 4 million customers. This is especially significant as the organization, which operates the largest SQL Server databases in Israel, relies on hundreds of applications and thousands of databases, of which over 500 are considered critical.

Doron Yitshaki, Clalit Health Services' CTO said that since 2006, the HMO has been using an Application Performance Management (APM) suite to help it locate performance bottlenecks. He added that Qure complements the suite's capabilities emphasizing the added level of awareness it provided - highlighting not just where the problems reside, but what needs to be done in order to fix them.

Clalit's experts noted that Qure makes recommendations that, without it, database personnel would have a difficult time identifying and implementing, such as data-type changes.

Qure addresses half of most common SQL programming mistakes

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 10:06:00 +0000

I recently ran across a very interesting article describing the "ten common SQL programming mistakes". The article, which was written by SQL Server MVP Plamen Ratchev and published on Simple-Talk, presents, based on the writer's extensive experience, some of the more common mistakes made by professional while coding SQL. Obviously, such a list is not exhaustive, but I believe that many of my colleagues would agree to a large part of it.

After I went over the entire list I realized that DBSophic's solution, Qure, actually addresses half of those mistakes. The meaning is that by adopting Qure, organizations can save much time and resources and substantially reduce the number of these mistakes, allowing their DBA's to pay more attention to other urgent issues.

It is interesting to note that, while Qure addresses half of the problems, the second half are logical query errors which may either raise errors or return unexpected results.

In order to validate my point I have divided Ratchev's common mistakes into three groups:

Issues fully addressed by Qure

NULLs and the NOT IN predicate
Functions on indexed columns in predicates
Data type mismatch in predicates
Use of SELECT
Scalar user-defined functions

Issues that Qure addresses partially or indirectly

Overuse of cursors

Logical Query Issues

Incorrect sub query column
Predicate evaluation order
Outer joins and placement of predicates
Sub queries that return more than one value

Trace Analyzer Launch Draws High Interest

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 11:48:00 +0000

The launching of DBSophic's new Trace Analyzer tool for Microsoft SQL server turned into a great success as hundreds of users turned to the company's Web site to download the free software.

The product also attracted the professional media's attention. Among others, the powerful Japanese blog Gigazine covered the product, drawing much attention from local users. The Osaka-based news site was ranked as one of the Top 25 Blogs by TIME.com and as one of the world's 50 most powerful blogs by Guardian UK. It was also received coverage at popular blogs, Softpedia, Code Beach and other sources. The Trace Analyzer can be downloaded from several download sites on top of the company's website, such as Softpedia, Simtel and Download.com.

The successful launch of the Trace Analyzer tool led to increased interest in DBSophic's flagship software solution Qure, which reduces DBA's time spent looking for the causes of performance problems and helps organizations to continuously improve their databases' performance.

The new Trace Analyzer allows users to instantly find out what is slowing down their databases so they can easily pinpoint which batches or specific parameter value sets consume the most resources.

DBSophic's Trace Analyzer helps DBAs quickly analyze multiple trace files and trace tables. The user receives, within a few minutes, all the trace events analyzed, de-parameterized, grouped and clearly arranged in a tree format. The results display the total resource consumption and enable to drill down to specific parameter value sets.

IDC: DB market continued to grow in 2008

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 11:58:00 +0000

A new report published by research company IDC indicates that the database (DB) market continues to grow even at times when other market segments are witnessing significant difficulties. According to IDC analysts total revenues in the DB market grew by an impressive 9.4% in 2008 to over $24 billion.

The document, which tracked the worldwide database management systems revenues in 2008, further shows that Microsoft SQL Server outpaced all other RDBMS vendors with a growth rate of 14% in license revenue in 2007.

The report of IDC analysts, further illustrates the fact that even in a year which witnessed significant growth in the number of new releases by other vendors, SQL Server maintained its leading position and experienced double-digit growth.

The research further shows that Oracle managed to maintain its prominent position as an industry leader with a market share of 44.3% of total revenue and a growth rate of 13.3% in sales.

IBM came in second with a market share of 22.3% and a growth rate of 13.3%, similar to that of Oracle. It was followed by Microsoft, which held a 18.5% market share, but witnessed the highest growth rate.

Sybase and Teradata rounded out the top five, garnering market shares of 3.5% and 3.3%, respectively.

New Trace Analysis Tool Allows Quick Detection of Slow Performing Database Operations

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 07:47:00 +0000

Last week, DBSophic, a leader in database performance optimization solutions, launched Trace Analyzer, a new free tool for analyzing Microsoft SQL Server 2005/2008 traces.

Trace Analyzer allows users to quickly identify operations and processes that cause slow database performance.

The new tool can help database administrators to quickly analyze a large number of trace events, stored in multiple trace files and trace tables. Within minutes, they can view the trace events analyzed, de-parameterized, grouped and clearly arranged in a tree format, and ordered by their resource consumption.

Trace Analyzer enables database professionals to easily pinpoint the batches or statements that are consuming the most resources.
Furthermore, it enables drill down to specific executions with parameter value sets to quickly identify execution anomalies.
The tool allows database professionals to analyze database operations so that they can better monitor and improve the performance of their application transactions.

Trace Analyzer can save users a lot of time and effort in troubleshooting performance issues.

Forrester: Upgrading to SQL Server 2008 Leads to Substantial Financial Benefits

Thu, 14 May 2009 10:01:00 +0000

Companies that upgraded from SQL Server 2000 or 2005 to SQL Server 2008, managed to increase their return on investment (ROI) substantially, according to a report by Forrester Consulting. The finding indicates that upgrading to Microsoft's SQL Server 2008 delivered an anticipated ROI of between 162% and 181%.

Forrester analysts said that by using the newer version companies can improve the performance, administration, integration, security and availability of SQL Server databases. In addition, it also increases the productivity of Database Administrators (DBA) and developers allowing them to better manage and exploit data stored in SQL databases.

The research, which was based on the experience of an existing health care system customer shows that the benefits for the organization from the upgrade amount to $3.1 million over a three-year period.

The benefits realized by the customer include:

Avoiding the addition of SQL Server 2008 servers (license and hardware savings) because of improved performance
Avoiding the addition of storage capacity by achieving data compression rates of 50%
Eliminating third-party software by using new features included in SQL Server 2008
Avoiding hiring additional IT employees
Increasing user productivity
Improving database performance
Improving data security
Improving the work experience for the database administration team

DB Performance Seen as 'Top Data Management Challenge' in 2009

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 16:38:00 +0000

Database performance is seen by professionals as the top data management challenge for 2009, according to a study conducted by DBTA (Database Trends and Applications).

The report, titled "Today's Top Data Management Challenges" indicates that 64.08% of IT professional currently view database performance as the main operational challenge.

The survey, which is based on 161 participants from many industries, including software development, retail, financial, government, manufacturing and health-care, indicates that the majority of institutions (71.61%) use Microsoft SQL server.

The findings are in line with an earlier report published by Forrester last year, which showed that 84% of the organizations use SQL server. Another 57.8% said they use Oracle, while less than half (47.1%) preferred IBM Informix.

In the report, which was conducted by Unisphere Research indicated that participants also view moving to a new database version is high on the list.

Analyst Elliot King said that while database professionals need to manage increasingly large databases that support mission-critical applications, companies seem resigned to accepting the amount of downtime they currently experience.

He concluded that organizations will try to do more with the same budgets and staff allocation and therefore, improving database performance is the top challenge.

Forrester Survey: 84% of Organizations Use Microsoft's SQL Server

Sun, 28 Dec 2008 14:28:00 +0000

84% of the organizations surveyed by Forrester use Microsoft's SQL server as their database management system, according to the research company's DBMS Survey for 2008. 76% of the institutions said they were using Oracle's DBMS, while another 56% indicated they make use of IBM's DB2.

The annual survey, which included companies in the fields of finance, insurance, manufacturing, telecommunications and government organizations, indicates that delivering improved performance is widely viewed the top data management challenge today.

92% of the organizations said that manageability and automation features are the most important factors for choosing a DBMS for enterprise application. The report, which is based on various customers, also shows that performance and automation are the top factors taken into consideration by organizations when they choose RDBMS providers.

84% of those surveyed said that delivering improved data is the top database management challenge while 76% said high data volume growth was their top priority.

The survey was conducted among companies with annual revenues of more than $300 million, with 65% of them earning more than an annual $1 billion in sales. 90% named performance and scalability as the most important features and another 88% named high availability of features.

IDC: Qure provides better TCO in comparison to competing products

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 12:44:00 +0000

DBShopic's key product, Qure, can be used at a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) when compared to competing tools, according to a report published recently by research company IDC.

"DBSophic solutions can be used to address application performance issues at a relatively lower TCO comparing to other solutions in this space, which could appeal to organizations in times of shrinking IT budgets," IDC analysts wrote.

They noted that DBSophic is a "company to watch" because:

Improving database performance is a long-time demand that is becoming increasingly important in light of the growing need to maintain application performance.
If DBSophic will be able to gain enough market traction, it may become an acquisition target for either APM or database management vendors.

IDC researchers said that the market for database development and management tools, estimated at $2.2 billion in 2008, is expected to reach $2.9 billion in 2012. They added that DBSophic's products also fit into the Applications Performance Management (APM) market category. APM solutions are part of the performance and availability management software market, estimated at $4.9 billion in 2008, and which is expected to reach $6.1 billion in 2012.

IDC experts noted that existing APM solutions are highly dependent on the capabilities and experience of DBAs that operate them to tackle database performance issues. "DBSophic's solution allows to automatically identifying and fixing database performance problems before they escalate," they concluded.