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 solution is perfect for a team with a large server count and, at least, moderate experience supporting a SQL Server environment. If the environment is smaller or the team has less experience working with SQL Server performance tuning methodologies, then the tool may be overwhelming for the users.
Read full review Pros Access via standard html Alert notification Read full review The Top SQL functionality has been extremely useful for identifying poorly performing queries by resource consumption. The flexibility of creating your own Advisory Conditions has allowed us to integrate our custom internal alerts into a centralized dashboard and alerting platform. Being able to highlight any chart on the dashboard and then tool-matching that window across all the other charts makes it much easier to correlate the different performance metrics against each other. 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 Tuning advice: With all the graphs and data available, it's not always easy to determine the best thing to do. I'd like to see SentryOne provide some best practice analysis based on the historical information collected for the server being looked at. They could add help tips or links to help documents, when you select a graph on the dashboard. Inexperienced users tend to put blinders on and focus on one thing when they see a high counter or something out of the ordinary. It would be very useful to include a link that provides underlying help. The link would provide an explanation of the counter in detail and offer possible explanations as to why the counter is off. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Absolutely. SQL Sentry is an absolute must have for any company with a SQL Server estate. It provides a force multiplier to effectively manage SQL Server, and the feature sets are second to none. The support and expertise at SentryOne is incredible. They are very supportive of both the platform users and helping your business with the product
Read full review Usability I accept that the flexibility of the alerting comes at a price. Other than the alerting SQL Sentry's interface is intuitive. Connecting to a new SQL instance, given that all the needed ports are open in your firewalls is straight forward. Reviewing the performance and queries for an instance is available in with a right click. As you dig in new tabs are created to present the detailed data. I find the ability to filter and rollup metrics on a query very helpful in dealing with the "it's running slow". You can easily compare the metrics of run times for the same query to let the user know, it's probably data your doing a billion reads instead of the usual 100 thousand.
Read full review Reliability and Availability The system is working perfectly in capturing data, but we do experience issues with SQL Timeout when viewing results in the remote clients. This may be due to the fact that our monitoring service is consuming most of the CPU, and it is the same server that is hosting the SQL Repository. We could probably fix the issue by separating the SQL instance from the monitoring service.
Read full review Performance In most cases the pages load very quickly. In our particular case, we need to do some movement of services to separate our monitoring service to separate infrastructure from the repository. When we first started with SQL Sentry on 5 licenses, we did not have any issues. Since we have now grown that to 25, we are experiencing some challenges. We do not believe this to be a tool problem
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 From their infancy as a smaller company to now as a global player they have always kept focus on prioritising he customer. They know their product and the technology it supports and are easily accessible for both resolving problems with the product all the way to adding value through additional training and assisting with getting return on investment through utilisation of the many features the product provides.
Read full review In-Person Training sql sentry expert came onsight to review the performance of installation and gave us a good insight to using the tool
Read full review Implementation Rating Was suggested that we install the process monitors on a dev or qa database server, but we found it more useful to create an IT db server and put it there (along with a few other apps that we use for monitoring).
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 SQL Sentry offers more features and is customize-able to fit our business needs. It has more centralized management and support. The company's technical support is also top notch. It is also worth mentioning that SentryOne Team Blog is an excellent source. One can find lots of valuable troubleshooting skills on the blog site - very educational and informational.
Read full review Scalability We are running 25 instances through a single monitoring service and it is able to keep up. We are finding that this many instances in our environment is about as many as can be handled. We will need to deploy additional monitoring services. Luckily, there is no additional licensing costs to deploy additional monitoring services. For us, it's just an additional Azure VM.
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 Better customer service as it alerts me automatically to loss of service issues so I can react and either get things fixed before it impacts the customers or to let my management know as soon as possible It helps me find expensive SQL so our customers get better performance and we make better use of our resources Read full review ScreenShots SolarWinds SQL Sentry Screenshots