The role of a database administrator (DBA) has undergone tremendous evolution in the 21st Century. In the murky past, a DBA could carve out a career by specializing in a particular database platform. You’d come to work and log into your DB2 or Oracle system and do your thing. Every day presented an opportunity to increase your level of expertise regarding the specific databases that you were responsible for supporting.
Those days are gone forever. In today’s fast-paced IT environment the single platform DBA is an endangered species. Your organization likely employs multiple database platforms which you need to manage. This adds complexity to your everyday work life as you move between different database systems. While the general functions that you need to perform will be fairly consistent across different platforms, the specific methods may differ based on the tools provided by the solution.
The cloud further complicates database support in a multi-platform environment. You need to be familiar with diverse database products as well as understanding the implications of hosting them in multiple locations. Some of your databases may be on-premises while others live comfortably in the cloud. A tool that can help manage this complexity is essential to maintaining productivity in this distributed and diverse landscape.
A Tool to Manage Diverse Database Platforms
Aqua Data Studio (ADS) provides a tool that can mitigate the complexities of multi-platform support. The application offers a versatile database management and development solution that can tame the most complex implementation. You can access and manage all your database instances from a common interface which in itself will boost productivity. Think of all the time that can be saved by eliminating the need to jump around to different idiosyncratic management platforms.
One of the more outstanding features of Aqua Data Studio from a DBA’s perspective is how they have customized the tools within the application to conform to the database platforms that you will be administering. This customization increases the value of the app and will help streamline the daily activities that are required to keep your systems running efficiently.
Let’s take a look at some specific database platforms and the customizations that are built into Aqua Data Studio to make it easier to manage your systems. The general utilities which are similar to all platforms take into account the differences in the databases to provide precise functionality for your database team. Each tool provides a GUI for viewing and searching within the given Manager.
Amazon Redshift DBA Tools
Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers the Redshift data warehouse to its cloud customers. ADS provides a suite of tools designed for DBAs working on this platform.
- Instance Manager enables investigating query history and instance summaries.
- Session Manager displays session details, statistics, locks, and grouping. You can also kill a session from within the tool.
- Storage Manager lets you view, create, and drop storage for your databases.
- Security Manager allows you to view, create, alter, and drop users and groups from your database.
Oracle DBA Tools
DBA’s administering Oracle systems will benefit from these tools, which provide modify access in addition to view and search capability.
- Instance Manager lets you work with control files, Oracle job information, as well as general instance, Oracle, hidden, and NLS parameters.
- Session Manager gives you access to session details, statistics and many detailed items such as locks, open cursors, and long operations. You can trace and kill a session from here.
- Storage Manager is meant to work with Oracle tablespaces, datafiles, and objects and displays file and object I/O statistics.
- Security Manager which enables you to view, alter, create and drop users, roles, and profiles.
- Rollback Manager works with rollback segment properties.
- Log Manager lets you with log files, take checkpoints, and view the parameters of archive logs.
- SGA Manager and Oracle Server Statistics are two additional tools specifically designed for Oracle databases.
Microsoft SQL Server DBA Tools
The Aqua Data Studio tools designed for Microsoft SQL Server also furnish edit or modify capacity where appropriate.
- Instance Manager lets you access instance summaries, parameters, and server logs.
- Session Manager provides session statistics, details, locks, and groupings by process ID or other parameters.
- Storage Manager enables many operations to be performed on a database’s storage including backup and restore, setting checkpoints, and shrinking capacity.
- Security Manager allows for viewing and modifying security settings rated to database users and roles.
- Agent Manager lets you view, create, drop or alter alerts, jobs, and operators.
As you can see from the rundown of the specific toolsets, while their general functionality is similar, the details are tailored to the design and features of the databases on which they operate. This is what makes these tools incredibly valuable to the DBAs using them.
This is not an exhaustive list of the database platforms supported by Aqua Data Studio. Tools for many other flavors of databases are available in ADS. Our list is intended to illustrate how the application presents a method of managing many databases from a single point while offering the specific features required to handle your environment’s software diversity. DBAs working in multi-platform installations will enjoy the time-savings and productivity gains that Aqua Data Studio will provide.