Oracle Enterprise Manager vs. Pragmatic Workbench (discontinued)

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.

Incentivized

Workbench Enterprise is consistent across devices and users so far. It works the same, and access is easy. I have a problem with its security. If you use an enterprise password to access databases, it's very easy to click the show password on the connection page and expose the enterprise password. You shouldn't allow users to use the same accounts to access the database because that means all users are sharing the same password.

Incentivized

• Database status. Being able to see which databases are up/down, at a glance, allows us to quickly react to issues.
• Reporting. We report on last backups, daily status, a host of metrics, and compliance levels of all our databases. With reporting we come into the office with a set of "status" reports and we know instantly if a database has issues.
• Metrics. We have a number of KPI's and SLA's we need to meet. Metrics applied to the databases allow us to stay on top of those requirements as well as fix common issues without a DBA needing to log in to assess the issue.

Incentivized

• Querying is easy and quick.
• Updating tables is very easy.
• It gives us very accurate error messages.

Incentivized

• We also use OEM to monitor SQL Server. However, OEM only provided limited features for SQL Server. It would be nice if we can schedule backup jobs for SQL Server in OEM.
• The ability to run SQL queries. You can't run queries in OEM. I have to go to SQL Developer or SQL PLUS to run. queries.

Incentivized

• It has autocompleted, but I find it difficult to use or get to use.
• It doesn't automatically complete table names or field names.

Incentivized

Navigation is clean and neat.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Our team does the support for us. Sometimes we see download related issues that can easily be fixed by our team. Most issues you will see with one user in your org will probably happen to others, so keep a log and track those issues. Then have a fix for them somewhere that everyone has access to. This will save you a lot of time troubleshooting.

Incentivized

Toad for Oracle is more suited for individual users who have a strong focus on database development, and it is not as comprehensive as Oracle Enterprise Manager. While it is quite decent in logical database layer tasks, such as schema objects and SQL, it lacks visibility into host level and I/O layer performance stats.

Incentivized

I work with OEM SCP team. They are great.

Incentivized

• When we were using Oracle GoldenGate, it made our life easy in terms of visually seeing the configuration and identifying issues easily
• It also makes ASM management very easy instead of doing it in the command line
• Creating policies and implementing certain standard configurations across all the databases is easy

Incentivized

• I personally like Workbench Enterprise, and I can do everything I need to do using it.

Incentivized