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Embarcadero Revamps Database Development and Performance Suite
Embarcadero Technologies today released a new suite of tools aimed at developers looking to tune Java and SQL code in data driven applications.
The revamped tools are based on the CodeGear technology San Francisco-based Embarcadero acquired last year from Borland Software and are focused at the design, building and running of database applications. The tools address the various stages of the database development and performance management lifecycles.
"When we look at the roles that are strewn about that lifecycle, the architects, database or application developers, QA engineers, as well as DBAs, people are certainly looking for optimization along each part of that lifecycle," said Greg Nerpouni, the company's senior product manager for developer solutions.
"What's most interesting is the convergence of application and database performance management," said Philip Howard, an analyst at U.K.-based Bloor Research, in an e-mail. "A lot of vendors only do one or the other and you really need both to avoid blame games, so I like the general approach."
The first tool in the new offering is J Optimizer 2009, based on the former Optimizeit tooling from Borland, which the company had discontinued, Nerpouni said The tool has gone through six months of redevelopment, he said, adding Eclipse-based support. While some of the features were put into JBuilder, "We re-incarnated it as a standalone tool," Nerpouni said. "The nice thing about it is it allows you to plug into your favorite third-party Java IDE."
The tool lets Java developers segregate and fix performance issues of Java applications. Developers can profile memory and CPU usage, as well as display in detail the code being executed at the line level, according to the company. It can also track problems with JDBC, JMS, JSP and Web services, among other issues.
"When there are calls out to the database, it will tell you what SQL is being called and how it's performing from a time perspective," Nerpouni said. "But it leaves a little bit of a black box when you're going out to the database and back," he added, noting that's where the second tool, DB Optimizer 1.5 picks up.
DB Optimizer 1.5 is an upgraded release of the company's SQL profiling and tuning tool. "If you're an application developer using Delphi or C++, or developing any applications that are database-backed, DB Optimizer is a very interesting proposition for these folks to make sure the applications are performing from a system-wide perspective and not just the application layer perspective," Nerpouni said.
The new release adds continuous profiling and support for IBM's DB2, Microsoft's SQL Server and Sybase ASE database. The original 1.0 release only supported Oracle databases. The upgrade also sports a new user interface and Unicode support for international customers.
The third tool, Performance Center, is a database monitoring tool that tracks all functions that affect a database, such as memory, I/O, capacity, network, objects, users and SQL code, allowing developers to discover issues that are impacting performance.
The new suite is available as part of Embarcadero's All-Access offering, which allows organizations to license all of the company's tools under a common subscription.
The first two tools start at a price of $1,500, but the All-Access license starts at $2,250 per workstation.
About the Author
Jeffrey Schwartz is editor of Redmond magazine and also covers cloud computing for Virtualization Review's Cloud Report. In addition, he writes the Channeling the Cloud column for Redmond Channel Partner. Follow him on Twitter @JeffreySchwartz.