Likelihood to Recommend 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 Appropriate for general querying and some DBA work. It's the universal least-offensive solution for most environments - not best of breed, but not subject to unusual/extensive requirements. It just works. On the other hand, some functionality (e.g. data import/export, snippets) are perfunctory and minimal and seem to be either difficult or impossible to automate. If you need to streamline those operations, you'll be forced to rely on third-party solutions that mostly work on top of (instead of with) TOAD.
Read full review Pros 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 Export data into excel. Export data into excel using a pivot table functionality. Navigation between windows is intuitive and easy to understand. Good for SQL novices and experts alike. Read full review Cons 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 The workflow is a relatively new feature. Quest is adding additional functionality and the workflows are useful now. Would be nice if the 'Automate' feature was a bit easier to use. Would be nice if some of the SQL Editor features in the traditional interface worked better in the new workflow interface (although, these are being fixed with each release). Would be nice if there were fewer releases. 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 I find Toad Data Point easy to use for both the novice and the experienced business analyst. If all you desire is to access data and create spreadsheets...this is a snap. Toad Data Point actually has cool data analysis features built into it. The newer workflow interface makes automating steps a snap
Read full review Support Rating 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 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 Although Toad and
UltraEdit are both great products, from an SQL standpoint Toad is a much better editor and troubleshooter.
Read full review Return on Investment 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 It is the least common denominator - not particularly optimized for our environment or workflows. Hangs or slowdowns add anywhere from 5% - 7% for projects utilizing large/complicated data setts. (This could be due to other IT-imposed constraints and not entirely due to TOAD.) Trying to perform some operations requires reading documentation and experimenting in order to figure out the TOAD-specific approaches and commands. It just works (when we understand it). Updates don't break things and things don't suddenly start behaving differently. Best of all, we don't mysteriously lose functionality. Read full review ScreenShots SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer Screenshots