dbForge Studio (Edge) vs. SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer

Whenever a user or DBA wants to compare schematics between two environments, dbForge is extremely helpful. This is useful during version or framework upgrades, a database upgrade, patch implementations, service package implementations, or any time to environments would be different. The time it would take to write and execute queries, and then compare is exponentially longer than it takes with dbForge, where this is done and you have an application that allows you to quickly identify incongruities.

Incentivized

I believe that SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer is a great choice for an organization that does not have a specific DBA or one that is still growing into the role. SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer is filled with hints, tips, and explanations of the various readings and metrics. This is very useful to help understand what is happening and why, what it means, and what some potential solutions are towards remediating any issues. This is extremely valuable for our development team, allowing them to be more proactive with the queries they write in viewing how they perform and where bottlenecks might be.

Incentivized

• Compare entire or subset of MySQL tables between databases
• Configure comparison rules
• Sync data between compared databases depending on differences
• Save comparison rules for reuse and sharing
• Break down differences between missing/new records, or different records
• See differences highlighted per field
• Execute sync immediately, or save as an SQL script file
• Command-line tool that can be used to add comparisons to deploy scripts

Incentivized

• Ability to drill down to wait for the issue and have a clear path as to what may be causing the issue.
• Ability to quickly add a new target and the ease of installation and upgrades.
• Reporting features to group my most troublesome customers into a daily report in one email.
• Excellent customer support on any issues I can't immediately solve.

Incentivized

• [The] installation error I've already reported (ABARTN).xml [could use some improvement]. This has to do with Windows Defender (the default Windows anti-virus) not allowing the installation on the default installation directory of dbForge Studio [for SQL Server], thus the error. [With] the workaround, [I] was to disable the anti-virus for the duration of the installation, then turn it back on when the installation [was] been completed.
• [I would like to see] better defined licensing models for larger teams (seated vs. name licenses).

• Resiliency of the Monitoring checks after the server underwent maintenance reboot. My experience is the monitor (Action) needs to be started manually. If possible it can automatically detect service/server then start to monitor again when system is back up.
• Much lighter UI.
• Granularity up to minutes.

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

Although experience here is limited, as only one question has been asked and answered promptly, the registration and licensing process was very smooth and professional. There are forums online that discuss dbForge issues, as well as a Facts and Questions section on dbForge's website, so product support does seem to exist if needed.

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

I would say that dbForge equals or beats most of the abilities of the other tools I evaluated at the time. dbForge had better support (Devart), and regular feature updates. dbForge has better tools for data comparison and import/export. The price tag is slightly higher, but renewals rates are pretty good. It's a quality tool that still is well worth the cost.

Incentivized

I have used Spotlight (for Oracle on RAC) but it has been several years. The dashboard was crisp, clean, and intuitive, but the tool had a significant overhead. However, no competitor made a tool that met our needs at the time. I have also used Idera's SQL Diagnostic Manager in more than one company. That tool is helpful for a larger environment than we currently have. But I think it is better at alerting than DPA but worse at just about everything else. The good thing is you can flag an alert as acknowledged, so you stop getting emails. The bad thing is I don't think I could use it to troubleshoot issues like I do with DPA. I do not have enough experience to provide helpful feedback on the others selected.

Incentivized

• We perform better and faster syncing analysis between databases.
• We update running mysql databases faster and more efficiently.
• Especially with MySQL Workbench we had immense irritations due to all the crashes during the day. With dbForge Studio we finally had a power tool which is stable and does not crash constantly.

Incentivized

• Paid for itself in days. We had a stored procedure that could not meet its SLA, DPA highlighted the issue and contributed to the resolution.
• We had a stored procedure that we were able to calculate as running in 9 milliseconds, unfortunately, we had transactions coming in 7 milliseconds, resulting in duplicate transactions, indicating that a mutex function was needed.

Incentivized