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Technology Stocks : Platinum Technology -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: alan james geik who wrote (3535)	4/20/1998 10:07:00 PM
From: Richard Jurek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 4148

FYI. PLAT win's Network Computing's Editor's Choice award for DBA software over BMCS and Tivoli. The April 15th issue contains an article titled "PLATINUM, BMC & Tivoli Bring Enterprise Database Management Down To Earth" by Barry Nance. It is a long, good article, but the beginning few paragraphs interest us Plat-ers the most. I have presented some cuts here. The main text can be read at techweb.com. Just search on Platinum Technology. Rich From Network Computing: "The ideal vantage point for managing disparate databases across an enterprise is somewhere in heaven. Unfortunately, the average DBA's (database administrator) workplace is far from the ideal-and the workload isn't ideal, either. Gartner Group estimates that every Fortune 1,000 organization has an average of five database sources. Company acquisitions, along with uncoordinated purchasing by autonomous departments within the business community, account for this database diversity. Database management tools that hide differences among databases across the enterprise, while offering features such as global user administration, heterogeneous schema and content manipulation and timely problem detection, may make you think you've died and gone to heaven. To bring you up to speed on enterprise-level management tools for relational databases, we invited database tool vendors to submit their best administrative and management aids for evaluation in Network Computing's labs. We looked at how well they save a DBA time and energy by supporting multiple databases running on different platforms. We evaluated each tool's user interface and also tested user administration, schema and content manipulation and monitoring capabilities across a range of network scenarios. BMC Software sent us several products in its PATROL series: DB-Admin Knowledge Module, Pathfinder, DB-Voyager, DB-Alter, DB-Change Manager, DB-Integrity and SQL-Explorer. PLATINUM technology forwarded its Enterprise DBA 2.2 product, along with DBVision 3.1 for Oracle and Sybase, Database Analyzer for Oracle 1.1 and TSreorg for Oracle 2.0 and Sybase 1.0 modules. Tivoli Systems supplied us with Tivoli TME 10 Framework 3.5 and TME 10 Modules for monitoring Sybase, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server databases. Tivoli's parent company, IBM Corp., added its separately available, no-cost DB2 Enterprise Control Center (DB2 ECC) Microsoft Corp. advanced us a beta copy of SQL Server 7.0, which contains its SQL Enterprise Manager (SEM) component. SEM is not a heterogeneous tool and would have earned low marks if we had included it in this review; it runs only on Windows NT Server and administers SQL Server 7.0. Nevertheless, we discuss its value as an example of the level of integration with operating systems and databases that other vendors should aspire to (see "SQL Enterprise Manager-How It Should Be Done," on page 108) Hewlett-Packard Co. is in the process of making its OpenView product database-aware, but the new functionality wasn't ready for testing. HP's design for the latest OpenView components focuses narrowly on monitoring database events and problems, deliberately forgoing database administration and management tasks. HP says its programmers will extend OpenView's current network monitoring capabilities to encompass heterogeneous databases across an enterprise. Computer Associates International declined our invitation to submit UniCenter TNG's database modules. CA said it didn't want its network manager UniCenter TNG to be evaluated solely on the merits of the tool's RDBMS (relational database management system) functions. PLATINUM technology's Enterprise DBA 2.2 earns our Editor's Choice award, providing the greatest range of functions-user administration, schema and content management, and, with its DBVision add-on, database monitoring. Enterprise DBA offered an intuitive common user interface for some (but not all) management tasks, worked with popular RDBMSes and let us distribute the management workload across multiple computers. Enterprise DBA isn't perfect; you must purchase PLATINUM's TSreorg, DBVision and Database Analyzer components to complete most DBA tasks. These tools do not yet share Enterprise DBA's user interface, nor do they support all major databases. Nevertheless, Enterprise DBA is the best enterprise-level database management tool of the bunch."