CA Floats Out Raft of RDBMS Tools

Assimilated Into Unicenter

• By Chris McConnell
• 04/16/2002

With the update of a suite of database management tools, Computer Associates International, Inc. has ensured that the tools integrate together with the same interface to make DBAs jobs easier. The new tools integrate with CA’s Unicenter Database Management Console.

The five tools – Unicenter DBA v5.2, Unicenter Enterprise DBA v5.2, Unicenter Database Analyzer v2.2, Unicenter Tsreorg v3.1, and Unicenter Fast Unload v4.1 – all plug into the Database Management Console. The console ships with each product, so they can serve as standalone tools.

The new, modular approach to these products reflects CA’s new approach to Unicenter that came last year with Unicenter 3.0, according to Richard Bolesta, brand manager for database management at CA. In the past, Unicenter customers bought the overall enterprise management framework, then modules to plug in, for handling various tasks. Unicenter products are now available as discrete components, which can integrate together to form a whole.

“Each product is now a Unicenter product,” Bolesta says. Some products were sold solely as standalone products for client installations, while other were designed for the old Unicenter framework. Now a DBA has a full suite of tools operating with Unicenter.

Unicenter DBA v5.2 is a client-based product for building databases based on DB2 for S/390, Sybase, Oracle and others. The Enterprise edition is a server-side product with more scalability, but only serves Oracle installations today. Bolesta says CA is working to release a version for DB2.

Unicenter Database Analyzer is a tool for collecting information about databases with an eye toward performance optimization.

Unicenter Tsreorg helps DBAs reorganize databases for maximum performance or to reflect the changing business climate.

Unicenter Fast Unload is designed to extract information from existing databases.