Likelihood to Recommend Navicat Premium is a very well-rounded tool with a reasonable licensing fee given its feature set. It is primarily suited for technical resources who must work with a variety of different database systems, but who may not be database or command line tool wizards. However, its query building and job batch scheduling feature support end-users as they build competency, and it continues to hold its value even as users outgrow their training wheels. Navicat is probably not so appropriate for DBAs and others for whom database development and management is already a career path; these folks have their preferred toolsets, both vendor-supplied and homegrown, and they might consider the additional licensing cost to outweigh the value they'd personally get out of Navicat.
Read full review This is an easy 10 because I actually have recommended this product to multiple clients and colleagues! Any shop that writes its own SQL queries will benefit from the insight provided by SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer, so they know which of their queries is causing a bottleneck. Small shops or databases with only a few tables likely will see far fewer opportunities for optimization.
Read full review Pros Access via standard html Alert notification Read full review Maintains historical SQL execution data, enabling forensic analysis Has the ability to slice and dice the data so that you can drill down to the execution of a single SQL statement being executed by a stored procedure Alerts to when the consumption pattern changes Shows historical average run times against the current, illustrating problems when they arise Provides tuning advice based on best practices Read full review Cons Navicat Premium's documentation can be hit-or-miss, as there are several versions available, and it's not always clear which documentation is current for the version at hand. Navicat Premium's query building interface is not as easy to use or feature-rich as standard IDE and text editor tools, and I've had some issues in the most recent release build with queries auto-running in the middle of making edits, causing a lack of responsiveness in the inbuilt editor -- however, Navicat offers users the ability to edit queries via an external editor, which mitigates these issues to some degree. In the data browser view, paged data navigation sometimes behaves unexpectedly or fails to work whatsoever, requiring a session restart to correct. The process of saving a data export file is cumbersome, requiring navigation through several windows, and I believe it could be significantly streamlined to improve user experience. Read full review Alerts seem to be lacking in DPA compared to competitor's tools. They can be setup but are not quite as easy or as helpful as some other tools I have used. Grooming/pruning the repository database isn't very easy. We don't manage a lot of instances but our repo DB has grown pretty significantly. At times when I am drilled-down to a chart, it can be difficult to navigate around from that point to another time range/query/metric. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We have relied on this product for a very long time and it continues to exceed expectations. The product is a vital part of our organization at this point, it would not be very ideal for us to abandon it. We use it almost every day and depend on its alerts for critical parts of our business
Read full review Usability I don't want to think about managing clusters of SQL servers in the future without this tool. We have demoed other tools and SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer is the gold standard for usability and insight into what your servers are doing. The UI is a bit dated, but everything is laid out in a logical manner and drilling down into queries or timeslices is extremely intuitive.
Read full review Support Rating Very robust online community and well as excellent support staff. Easy to follow video tutorials. Detailed sample configurations are provided with guided walk-throughs via remote classroom instruction. Very fast response from support staff. No internal hires were necessary for support as vendor support staff fully met all technical expertise. 24/7 incident reporting and tracking is great.
Read full review I have had to use their support on a few occasions, for reasons that I am not clear about until recently I have always had problems upgrading the software (although the last 2 updates have gone without issue which I am very pleased to say). On those unfortunate occasions, the support has been brilliant with either excellently documented guides on how to resolve the issue by myself or have been hands-on with calls and screen sharing to remotely fix the issue. Every time the problem was sorted and more importantly, nothing was lost (apart from a bit of time). And as I stated above whatever the problem was that was causing my upgrade issues appears to have been resolved in the last 2 updates.
Read full review Implementation Rating Follow the guidelines for the capacity of the servers. We found that the DPA databases were getting rather large and also that there are ways to reduce their size built into some of the options.
Read full review Alternatives Considered While
Sequel Pro is a great shareware tool, it's limited to MySQL databases; while our department does use MySQL databases, we also use Oracle databases, so Navicat Premium's multi-product support is an absolute requirement. Navicat Premium also provides data browser support, including filtering, to empower less technically-minded users to query and manipulate databases, an option not available in
Sequel Pro . And the job scheduling and batching features of Navicat Premium further distinguish it above the admirable, if limited,
Sequel Pro .
Read full review At the time, we found SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer to be easier to setup and to have a richer feature set than
Redgate SQL Monitor , plus, from what I remember, the DPA pricing worked better for us over the course of a year. We're very happy with all the features DPA has to offer.
Read full review Return on Investment Similar features to OEM provided very easy to use, out-of-the-box functionality. No large infrastructure changes were needed to deploy and install. Read full review It has allowed us to progress as an organization with much less reliance on a direct DBA than would traditionally be required Allowed us to be much more proactive in our performance monitoring and responding to issues that would affect users. Read full review ScreenShots SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer Screenshots