BEZ Systems Announces Data Warehouse and Data Mart Performance Engineering Tools Supporting ORACLE OPS on IBM RS/6000 SP Platform

Business Wire, Nov 11, 1997

DEERFIELD, Ill.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 11, 1997--BEZ Systems today announced a new version of its data warehouse and data mart performance engineering tools, collectively named BEZPlus, for ORACLE OPS on the IBM RS/6000 SP platform.

According to analysts and major vendors, almost 50% of data warehouse projects fail because of a lack of proper planning. "The design, development and growth of data warehouses requires an analysis of many tradeoffs, and an evaluation of different alternatives," said BEZ Systems' President, Dr. Boris Zibitsker. "BEZPlus enables users to design their data warehouse applications for peak performance and reduce the risk of performance surprises."

With the help of BEZPlus products, performance analysts and DBAs can analyze the performance of databases, identify hardware and software bottlenecks, assess the impact on performance of reorganizing the database, and of adding new hardware. This enables the database administrator to see the impact of the proposed changes before the actual change is made, saving time and money.

David Butler, senior director of OPS development at Oracle Corporation, said, "The BEZ suite of performance analysis and capacity planning tools is a welcome addition to the growing family of programs designed to assist customers with their Oracle Parallel Server applications on large IBM parallel platforms."

Michael Maas, manager of OLTP, IBM RS/6000 Division said, "The BEZPlus suite of products provides performance engineering tools targeted at the growing data warehouse market in which the RS/6000 SP is a leader. We are pleased that BEZ is offering new capabilities to our customers looking to tune their databases for peak performance on the RS/6000 SP."

In environments where data warehouses support a number of data marts, products in the BEZPlus family can be used to analyze patterns of use to decide what data should be propagated to different data marts and how often the data marts should be synchronized with the data warehouse. This will enable DBAs to avoid replicating useless data at data marts, thus saving hardware resources at data marts and network traffic.

BEZPlus for ORACLE, which supports the Oracle Parallel Server, consists of INVESTIGATOR, SerView DBA, STRATEGIST and CorpView DBA.

INVESTIGATOR is a performance management tool that extracts measurement data, provides daily reporting, performs workload characterization, generates graphs, and creates a baseline model. An analyst can identify the existing performance bottlenecks, critical workloads, users and SQL that use an excessive amount of system resources. INVESTIGATOR narrows down the scope of tuning efforts to both reduce the time and increase the effectiveness of performance management efforts.

SerView DBA is designed to optimize database administration functions. This product conducts a detailed analysis of SQL and tables accessed by different users. SerView DBA helps to decide what should be tuned, in order to make tuning efforts more effective. It provides in-depth table usage analysis, helps to create right indexes, and reduces the time and effort required to tune the complex environment.

STRATEGIST is a performance prediction tool that models, evaluates and predicts performance. This tool allows users to evaluate different alternatives and answer a variety of "What-If" questions regarding the impact of workload and database size growth, change in hardware configuration, scheduling, and more. STRATEGIST's automatic model calibration and performance prediction simplifies the daily performance and capacity planning functions. Performance prediction results help to justify hardware upgrades, evaluate database and application design alternatives, evaluate the impact of changes in scheduling, and justify data warehouse solutions.

CorpView DBA incorporates statistical process control methodology to support enterprise-wide database performance engineering functions. CorpView DBA shows the patterns in hardware utilization, arrival rate, response time by critical workloads and how database objects are used. By identifying and analyzing how database objects are used, CorpView DBA provides the critical information needed to manage and tune the complex MPP environments. CorpView DBA data can be used independently, or together with the BEZPlus tools SerView DBA, INVESTIGATOR, and STRATEGIST to address a variety of database performance engineering and capacity management issues for data warehouse and distributed datamart environments.

The four products, which constitute BEZPlus, are available individually or as a suite. They are priced on a per-node basis, ranging from $2,500 per product per node down to $500 per product per node, depending on number of nodes.

BEZPlus for ORACLE is available now. BEZPlus for UDB on RS/6000 SP will be available during the first quarter of 1998. BEZPlus for Teradata on the NCR 5100 was announced previously.

BEZPlus, STRATEGIST, INVESTIGATOR, CorpView DBA and SerView DBA are trademarks of BEZ Systems. All other marks are the property of their owners, and BEZ disavows any interest in them.