Confio's Ignite for Oracle E-Business Suite aims to end the DBA blame game

By Mark Brunelli, News Editor 12 Apr 2007 | SearchOracle.com

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An offshoot of Confio's flagship product, Ignite for Oracle, Confio's new Ignite for E-Business is designed specifically for DBAs charged with performance tuning databases that back up Oracle E-Business Suite applications.

Boulder, Colo.-based Confio says the new product identifies application delays at the database layer by providing deep insight into wait times -- events or code glitches that cause applications to become hung up -- and more specifically, how those wait times impact individual end users.

The software also provides a diagnostic tool that pinpoints precisely whether the wait-time problem is, for example, a database administration issue, a problem with the SQL developer's code, or the result of a recent E-Business Suite application customization, according to Confio.

The result, said Dewaye Treadway, a DBA and systems administrator with Lone Star Steel Co. in Dallas, is less finger pointing and more problem solving.

"It's a good tool for identifying SQL code that may be causing wait times," said Treadway, who has tried out Ignite for E-Business and is a regular user of Ignite for Oracle. "And from a DBA perspective, it helps me identify to upper management that it's not a database problem, it's a code problem."

Confio's approach

When an Oracle E-Business Suite application begins to lag, a typical response is to throw more hardware and CPUs at it in order to speed things up. But this can be a costly and unnecessary resolution, said Don Bergal, Confio's chief operating officer, because oftentimes the real problem resides in the SQL code.

That's where Confio's wait-time analysis approach comes into play.

"This wait-time method is really a best practice for performance analysis, and it's all focused on measuring how long individual processes are taking within the database and [therefore] the application," Bergal explained.

By analyzing wait-time information, Bergal continued, Ignite for Oracle E-Business lets DBAs get to the root of problems and discover, ultimately, what's holding up the SQL.

"The net of it is that instead of just tuning typical parameters in the database -- things like how many read operations or what's my cache-hit ratio where you're really focused on the server -- here it's all focused on what's bothering my end users," Bergal said.

Confio's competition

According to Bergal, Confio is both in competition with and complementary to Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM), Oracle's database management suite that helps DBAs tackle everything from table configuration and backups to monitoring and performance tuning.

"OEM does have a lot of wait-time information, but you have to really dig through it and it doesn't really tell you this is what the problem is and this is what the resolution is," Bergal said. "Customers find us when they realize that they need a more specialized tool."

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Lone Star Steel's Treadway agreed, saying that OEM didn't offer his firm the right tools to analyze wait-time-related problems.

"We actually looked at OEM," Treadway said. "It does offer a lot of stuff, but it really doesn't do a lot of stuff related to Oracle wait-time performance."

Another one of Confio's key competitors is Quest Software Inc., Bergal said.

"Quest has a great dashboard, a very sophisticated interface and a big suite of tools that do everything," Bergal said. "But [Ignite for Oracle E-Business] is narrower and really focused on what the DBA needs."

Pricing and availability

Ignite for E-Business is generally available now and requires that users be running Confio's Ignite for Oracle software. The list price for Ignite for Oracle is $2,400 per monitored database CPU. The list price or Ignite for E-Business is $600 per monitored database CPU.

A free trial version of Ignite for E-Business is available for download from Confio's Web site.

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