BMC Delivers on Project Golden Gate

Company completes integration between Oracle management tools and SmartDBA administrative console

• By Stephen Swoyer
• 11/19/2002

New in the latest product revision is canned integration with BMC’s SmartDBA Web-based administration console, which the company says is an important milestone in its ongoing Project Golden Gate initiative.

Karl Chen, vice president of BMC's EDM marketing group, describes Project Golden Gate as a “vision” that will eventually produce a single management console—SmartDBA—capable of exploiting BMC’s standalone management tools to centralize database administration in distributed and mainframe environments.

“We will be delivering on Project Golden Gate over the next 18 months. We need to integrate some of our existing tools [in the open systems space] with SmartDBA, and we plan to introduce support for SmartDBA on S/390 and z/OS in the next twelve months.”

With the introduction of SQL-BackTrack for Oracle v3.4.10, BMC says that it has delivered on its Project Golden Gate goals for the administration of Oracle databases in open systems environments. To that end, DBAs can now use BMC’s SmartDBA console to perform performance, administration and recovery tasks in the Oracle environment.

SQL-BackTrack is a backup and recovery tool that supports a variety of database platforms in the open systems space, including Sybase and Microsoft Corp.’s SQL Server. The integration of SQL-BackTrack with the SmartDBA console makes it possible for DBAs to perform backup and recovery from any location where they have access to a Web browser. In addition, the integration between the two tools provides users with a central location from which to manage SQL-BackTrack, regardless of the number of servers on which it is deployed.

BMC’s other management products for Oracle—DBXray, a diagnostic and visualization tool for Oracle, and SQL-Explorer, an Oracle tuning tool—also integrate with SmartDBA.

The company has announced it will introduce new versions of SQL-Explorer and DBXray in December and January that support enhanced intelligence capabilities. In December, BMC will ship version 6.2 of SQL-Explorer for Oracle v6.2, which boasts a new rewrite engine that can evaluate thousands of potential SQL rewrites and, in turn, recommend the most efficient SQL statement.

In January, BMC will deliver version 3.0 of DBXray for Oracle v3.0, which supports a new Trace User Session capability that simplifies the task of identifying and resolving user related performance problems by automating the multiple steps required with a single action. DBXray 3.0 also features an Alarm Calibration and History feature that records activity that exceeds current performance thresholds and allows the DBA to analyze performance trends.