OREANDA-NEWS. SolarWinds, a leading provider of powerful and affordable IT management software, today announced significant updates to its SolarWinds® Database Performance Analyzer (DPA). With the enhancements, SolarWinds DPA is the only tool available on the market capable of providing Multi-Dimensional Performance Analysis™ to improve Software as a Service (SaaS) application performance for MySQL®- and Linux®-only IT organisations, helping them reduce costs and improve overall organisational effectiveness.

Specifically, SolarWinds DPA now supports MySQL database repositories, enabling SaaS companies running MySQL- and Linux-only infrastructure whether on-premises or in the cloud to fully leverage the award-winning tool, whereas a Microsoft® SQL Server® or Oracle® repository were required previously.

Additional significant new features in the latest release of SolarWinds DPA include visualisation and analysis to help DBAs optimise for and resolve blocking, locking and deadlock issues, and support for Microsoft SQL Server 2016.

Support for MySQL- and Linux-Only IT Organisations

Conventional MySQL monitoring tools offer SaaS companies and other predominantly MySQL IT organisations only a simplistic set of database health metrics that are often inadequate in identifying and resolving database bottlenecks impacting application performance. SolarWinds DPA can help database administrators (DBAs), application developers and operations teams quickly reveal the root cause of performance problems with a unique response-time analysis approach that helps application teams by correlating SQL operations, wait events and server and virtualisation resources to pinpoint MySQL database bottlenecks impacting application performance.

With the latest release, IT professionals working in MySQL- and Linux-only environments are now able to fully leverage the power of SolarWinds DPA thanks to newly added support for MySQL repositories. Support for MySQL repositories also enables IT professionals with SQL Server, Oracle, Microsoft Azure® or Amazon® RDS environments to reduce licensing fee costs by leveraging a lower-cost MySQL repository.

"For technology-based companies, application performance and infrastructure costs are two key business metrics," said Gerardo Dada, vice president, product marketing, SolarWinds. "With SolarWinds DPA, development and operations teams who rely on MySQL databases can improve both metrics by leveraging the only application performance intelligence tool that delivers Multi-Dimensional Performance Analysis. Until now, most of these teams were in the dark when it came to understanding exactly what drives database performance, as traditional application performance management tools have offered little help in this area. We're particularly excited for this release of SolarWinds DPA and the positive business impact it will have for SaaS vendors, as well as others."

Blocking and Locking

Blocks and locks are normal functions within a database, but poor query performance will increase blocking time and negatively impact application performance. SolarWinds DPA now empowers DBAs with SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL and SAP® ASE databases to identify root blockers and the total wait they are causing, focus on the most important queries to reduce blocking time, see which objects are waiting the longest because of blocking and quickly identify the last query of an idle blocker to track down the last active session.

"The most significant benefit we get from SolarWinds DPA is the ability to glean performance metrics from our Oracle Standard Edition database that are otherwise only available with Oracle Enterprise Edition and their Diagnostics Pack and Tuning Pack licenses," said Sean Scott, Oracle database administrator, Bodybuilding.com. "With the new features of SolarWinds DPA, we look forward to being able to troubleshoot blocking and lock waits and resolve idle blockers faster, further accelerating the performance of our databases."

Deadlocks

Deadlocks are an extreme blocking scenario that occurs when two or more blocking sessions are waiting for the other to release a lock on a table or other resource, but neither can release the lock. Databases resolve these contentions by selecting a victim and survivor. SolarWinds DPA now not only alerts when SQL Server deadlocks occur, but also identifies victims and the overall victim impact-the information necessary to help DBAs determine why a deadlock occurred and how to resolve deadlocking issues.

SQL Server 2016

With the newly added support for SQL Server 2016, SolarWinds DPA now supports the very latest versions of the top three major relational database platforms-MySQL 5.7, Oracle 12c and SQL Server 2016.

Pricing and Availability

SolarWinds DPA pricing starts at ?1315 GBP* for MySQL, SQL Server and Oracle Standard Edition, and ?2305 GBP* for DB2 and SAP ASE. SolarWinds offers fully functional two-week trials on the Amazon AWS® Marketplace as an AMI, on the Azure Marketplace and as a downloadable version on the SolarWinds website that generally takes minutes to install. Customers will not incur SolarWinds software charges during free two-week cloud trials, however infrastructure charges may still apply. All database platforms are licensed by the instance, and pricing includes the first year of maintenance. For more information, including the downloadable, free 14-day evaluation, visit the SolarWinds website or call 866.530.8100.

*Price as of August 3, 2016. Pricing may vary based upon the jurisdiction and applicable currency. Please contact a local SolarWinds sales representative to find pricing specific to your jurisdiction.