Server Studio JE and Sentinel

Perfect Together

AGS' proven state-of-the-art solutions for IBM Informix® DBMS servers help organizations ensure critical database applications remain up and perform at peak levels, manage change and ensure access to vital business information.

Server Studio™ JE and Sentinel™ are complementary software products which together provide a powerful solutions infrastructure that helps both seasoned database professionals and novices alike manage IBM Informix® DBMS servers environment complexities with ease and significantly improved productivity. This multi-platform suite of integrated, highly intuitive system management tools provides wide-ranging functionality that enables database professionals to:

• Improve efficiency of database development and testing
• Manage multiple databases from a single console
• Automate daily database maintenance tasks
• Preserve database investment by automating database configuration auditing and change management
• Proactively diagnose performance and availability problems
• Enable real-time autonomic responses to server events
• Obtain maximum leverage from existing storage investments
• Resolve problems with comprehensive SQL tuning
• Effectively manage database security

Server Studio™ JE provides a comprehensive collection of modern, easy-to-use, proven tools for DBAs and developers that emulate the natural workflow and improve efficiency of performing common database tasks such as: SQL development and debugging, schema management, configuration auditing and change management, performance tuning, data storage management and reorganization, security administration and much more — all from an integrated graphical console that unites all development, administration and maintenance activities for your entire IBM Informix® DBMS servers infrastructure at a centralized point of control.

Sentinel™ automates proactive 24 × 7 operational monitoring of IBM Informix® DBMS servers, provides an extensive array of sophisticated diagnostics tools to optimize critical performance parameters, executes regular database maintenance tasks, enables setting of highly flexible multi-level alerts to flag availability and performance degradation problems and manages autonomic responses to server events in real time. Continuous time-series measurement data of the server’s performance, system alert events and task execution status flags obtained by Sentinel™ can be recorded in the built-in SQL-compliant repository for subsequent analysis.

  Avant-garde DBMS Tools Solutions

AGS products provide comprehensive support for your organization's critical IBM Informix® databases — from initial design and development all the way through to production deployment and successful operational service.

 Database Development and Debugging

Server Studio™ JE is the premier integrated development environment for IBM Informix database servers that features a rich collection of modern-day tools for coding stored procedures, schemas, SQL scripts and more — all from an easy-to-use, highly intuitive graphical user interface. They also include interactive debugging, SQL tuning, change analysis, and general administration features to help improve performance before deployment. Developer Pack is a streamlined edition of the Server Studio™ JE, geared primarily for development and debugging of database applications.

 Pre-Deployment Testing

For pre-deployment testing, Server Studio™ JE contains the Benchmark Runner, a load testing solution that effectively simulates real-life scenarios of hundreds or thousands of users simultaneously accessing your database application. It enables DBAs and database developers to pinpoint bottlenecks and set database performance benchmarks by gathering the required database performance facts needed to identify point-of-system failures and achieve required levels of performance.

Server Studio™ JE also contains the Data Manager that allows developers and QA engineers to quickly and easily populate test databases with millions of rows of meaningful, syntactically correct test data, while maintaining full referential integrity, enabling application testing with enough data to give a realistic picture of database performance in the production environment.

 Database Change Management

Server Studio™ JE's Schema Manager eases the deployment of IBM Informix schema changes from development to test to production by managing database objects' dependencies while maintaining control with extensive change documentation.

Another powerful change management tool in the Server Studio™ JE arsenal is the DB Difference Analyzer which is capable of performing comprehensive comparative analysis on all database object properties including table structures, referential integrity, fragmentation, and syntax of stored procedures, triggers and views. It can also automatically generate synchronization scripts, based on comparison results of two databases.

 Database Administration

Server Studio™ JE is a state-of-the-art integrated workbench for IBM Informix DBMS servers that allows you to manage multiple databases from a single console. Server Administrator component simplifies database maintenance with a comprehensive graphical object management interface that allows you to quickly create, drop or alter database objects to accommodate business and application needs. It also simplifies systems administration with a rich set of reports for accessing server's performance and data storage space utilization.

 Database Performance Diagnostics and Alerts

Sentinel™ provides a configurable matrix of over 100 real-time performance diagnostics parameters for 24 X 7 monitoring of the database server operations. Continuous time-series measurements data of the server's performance can be captured and stored in the built-in History Repository for subsequent analysis. Multi-level threshold alerts can be configured for the diagnostic parameters to provide proactive notification of and autonomic responses to server events. Sentinel™ fully integrates with Server Studio™ JE to provide easy-to-use graphical interface that exposes the real-time performance characteristics of your database server, allowing you to immediately identify potential causes of degraded performance and take appropriate remedial action — all from within the same integrated workstation console.

 Storage Space Management and Database Reorganizations

Server Studio™ JE's Server Administration module's data storage management facilities significantly improve utilization efficiency of scarce data storage resources and help optimize performance by reorganizing and restructuring your IBM Informix database with minimal application downtime. Storage Management facilities enable you to easily create or delete DB Spaces, BLOB Spaces and Chunks and provide a graphical representation of space use in your databases. By examining filled and free space percentages, how DB Spaces and tables extents are allocated, you can quickly detect problems such as low scan density and high fragmentation. The built-in Reorganization Wizard helps easily resolve data storage space utilization and performance problems by reorganizing table structure and data allocation to reduce the number of table extents, reclaiming wasted space, moving data to a different DB Spaces or fragmenting it between multiple DB Spaces.

 SQL Tuning

Server Studio™ JE's comprehensive tuning solution helps you deal effectively with SQL performance optimization and problematic SQL detection. The Query Execution Plan Analyzer reduces learning curve, by providing intuitive SQL tuning environment that assists you in optimizing the performance of your SQL queries through automatic analysis of the execution plan selected by the IBM Informix server's Query Optimizer.

Sentinel™ SQL Capture allows you to retrieve SQL statements running on the IBM Informix server. You can explicitly specify, which SQL statements have to be retrieved based on session user login name, client host, Informix session ID, or SQL statement’s execution statistical parameters, such as estimated cost, estimated number of retrieved rows or number of sequential scans.

 Database Security Management

Server Studio™ JE's Permissions Manager significantly reduces the complexities of managing database security by making it easy to add new or edit the existing users and roles to a database, grant or revoke permissions for users, roles and database objects and assign users to roles. Permission Manager also helps in maintaining database security by automatically recovering and applying all previously defined permissions to any object after it has been modified.