Oracle Coherence vs. SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer

Oracle Coherence can be used to solve latency problems by caching data near the application tier. In-memory performance helps to reduce data contention, thus improving application response time. Oracle Coherence does a great job at scaling linearly and can do so dynamically. Oracle Coherence can replicate data so it can be part of a disaster recovery solution. One thing that is often overlooked with elastic caches is their ability to analyze data in memory, leveraging the processing power of the data grid. This is something Oracle Coherence does exceptionally well. Oracle Coherence also provided event handling capabilities to allow applications to respond to events triggered by transactions.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Performance. Superfast resolution of complex data grid queries.
• Reliability. Availability domain support for disaster recovery.
• Programming model. Frictionless API for use with Java 8.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• I can't really come up with too many flaws, but possibly a bit expensive considering there are good open source caches like Ehcache.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Oracle Coherence support team is responsive and knowledgeable. We contacted them to ask a couple of design questions about how we were setting up Oracle Coherence based on how we used IBM's Datapower Extreme Scale. They were able to guide us so that we got the design correct the first time and didn't have to go back and re-architect our design later.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

DataSynapse GridServer has the same cache functionality connected with a grid distributed application deployment platform. It provides all the necessary tools to configure and manage these applications. On the otherhand Oracle Coherence has more a flexible configuration and better performance. Also the Oracle configuration and monitoring tools are more convenient and informative than the DataSynapse ones.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• In my current project, it is yet to be decided as we are on the way to make it live for users. But I am sure it will be an added value to obtain timely calculations.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized