DBArtisan from Embarcadero Technologies (acquired by Idera) is a database administration toolset.
N/A
Oracle Enterprise Manager
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
Oracle’s Enterprise Manager is an on-premises monitoring and management tool. The console is designed primarily to manage other Oracle products, it but can integrate to manage non-Oracle components as well.
Overall excellent tool for DBAs. Seamless cross-platform integration, which is rare (or non-existent) among its competitors. The "monitor" helps the DBA to see everything that's going on in the database. Similarly, the interface is well-organized so that you can navigate to …
OEM is very well suited for all Oracle products, especially Oracle databases and Exadata machines; even not Oracle hardware, it is very good and displaying high level details. OEM is not well suited for older hardware vendors like AIX, HP-UX, DEC/Digital, Microsoft (sql server). This is a big negative as most large companies have a heterogeneous environment with many different vendor hardware and (database) software products.
User interface is easy to use, and in some ways better than Toad. The left hand side shows all databases, and you can drill down to instance, storage, schemas, tablespaces, and performance views. The right hand side displays the details of the selected object.
This is the best tool if you want to manage multiple RDBMS platforms in a single tool using the same familiar interface. Other third party tools can do it also, but it's not nearly as integrated as this, and may require additional plug-ins installed. DBArtisan excels at this, and can perform cross-platform data migrations easily.
It has different DB analysts, which can help diagnose issues with performance, optimize storage, detect fragmentation, and plan for capacity growth. For almost any action you want to take, you can generate the DDL for preview, and/or schedule it to run at a specific time.
Monitoring Templates: There are out of box monitoring templates for each target types, you can customize them or use them as it is.
Administrative Groups: This is a relatively new feature in OEM Cloud Control. This lets you create and manage your targets and monitoring templates smarter and with less re-work.
DB Monitoring: There are so many cool DB monitoring features and visual graphics, that it can be used by both DBA and functional people to see what's going on in the database.
Bugs. Every version we upgrade to has a number of bugs. Some stop us from rolling to production OEM (we have a sandbox OEM), some are simply annoying. If I could improve on one thing, it would be for better QA from oracle before releasing each version.
Flash. I'm told that they are moving from Flash to Jet in version 13.3 and beyond (we are on 13.2 currently). That change cannot come soon enough. The OEM pages load SO slowly due to Flash.
Hierarchy Groups. OEM allows five Hierarchy groups. A Hierarchy group allows a top down metric/rule roll out. However, they limit you to five. I'd like to see them open that up, so that we can have any number of custom groups.
It's great! It does everything and anything you would want it to do. It can monitor things which doesn't comes out of the box by adding plug ins to it, for example, you can even monitor Oracle GoldenGate Replication by adding a plug-in to OEM Cloud Control.
I still rate OEM as a must-have tool for central management of Oracle fleet. The pros and cons of the product is prominent. Meanwhile, I also acknowledge that OEM was design about a decade ago. At that time, it did not have the landscape we have today, such as cloud, DEVOPS, machine learning, etc. I hope in future releases, the design will incorporate those features.
Being an Oracle shop using Oracle Database and MySQL, management console from Oracle was a better choice than IBM or Microsoft even though we do use Microsoft Azure and storage/servers from IBM (on-prem).
It has a positive ROI on our organization. It's better than OEM and SQL Developer. Although the license could be expensive, it is perfect for large organizations, especially with multiple RDBMS platforms.
Most features are redundant between DBArtisan and Toad. I would not recommend using both if you already own one of them. Just download the trial for the one you're not using, and see what works best for your organization.
DBArtisan is great for DBAs and would be my personal preference. Toad is good for developers and DBAs alike but I feel like sometimes the interface is too busy and too clumsy to use.
We are a 7x24 shop. Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control helps us meet that objective by proactively warning us before issues cause down time. Things like disk space, archive log issues or temporary table space issues.
Spreading the use of this tool outside of the DBA group has allowed us to not hire additional personnel for those teams. Over time, as folks have retired from our operations team, we are not replacing them. Instead we have used OEM Cloud Control to automate tasks.
We also now have the tools to measure up-time by using specific measurements inside of OEM. This allows us to report real numbers to management.
