News

Start-up launches DB performance toolset

• By Rich Seeley
• July 23, 2003

Pinpointing database query problems in applications is the goal of IronTrack SQL, a new tool unveiled this week by IronGrid Inc., Austin, Texas.

IronGrid was founded in 2002 with plans to develop a family of tools that could help Java developers to monitor and improve application performance, according to Cliff Sharples, president and CEO at the start-up.

IronTrack SQL can monitor JDBC performance and display a "Gantt-style chart" that can help developers to see any database query activity that is causing problems in an application, Sharples explained. Optimizations based on the monitoring results can dramatically improve performance, he added.

"For example," he said, "one customer used our tool and found they had some very long-running queries, as well as some queries that were repetitively calling the database for the same information. Our tool uncovered that, and they were able to very easily change the code so it fixed that; they [also] gained a 20-times improvement in performance."

Another customer using the tool found that a query was hitting the database repeatedly for the same information, which was causing crashes as the number of users increased, Sharples said. That customer was able to stop the crashes by caching the data.

IronGrid offers a caching tool, IronEye Cache, as well as its original SQL monitoring tool, IronEye SQL.

More information on these tools and a free 30-day trial download of the new IronTrack SQL is available at www.irongrid.com.