News

CA offers free DBMS management tool

• By Stephen Swoyer
• April 26, 2006

CA is taking its cue from car dealers everywhere. The software giant plans to let DBAs take a test drive—on a more or less permanent basis—its database management console.

The idea, officials acknowledge, is to whet customers’ appetite by giving them first-hand experience with CA’s cross-platform RDBMS management tool, Unicenter Database Command Center. DCC is the central console for CA’s cross-platform database management products.

The initiative lets database administrators get a feel for the kinds of administrative tasks they can perform across a trio of prominent RDBMS platforms: DB2 UDB for distributed systems and DB2 for z/OS; Oracle; and Ingres. CA’s management stack also supports non-relational data sources (such as mainframe IMS repositories), but DCC is—at this point, anyway—a relational-only play. Its central UI is a Web browser, so it doesn’t require DBAs to install client software to use it.

CA officials say that large enterprises usually have several database platforms (relational and non-relational) in house. They cite research from Forrester senior analyst Noel Yuhanna, who says that very large enterprises sometimes have as many as 10,000 [databases], which collectively require more than 300 DBAs to effectively manage.

What’s needed, they argue, is a one-stop shop for RDBMS administration. This isn’t exactly a radical idea.

BMC Software offers SmartDBA Cockpit, an all-in-one console that enables DBAs to manage DB2 UDB, Oracle, SQL Server, or Sybase databases from a single console, regardless of their expertise on a given platform. Database administrators can tap SmartDBA to perform some DB2 administrative tasks on Oracle or Sybase.

BMC doesn’t give SmartDBA Cockpit away for free, however. Customers must deploy SmartDBA Cockpit in tandem with BMC’s other, database-specific management tools if they’re to realize the breadth of its all-in-one administrative capabilities.

Unicenter DCC can perform several native tasks, including centralized schema management and unified cross-platform account management, according to CA. It also provides data unload and reorg functionality for Ingres r3.

Its real strengths, of course, are realized in tandem with other CA database management products, such as Unicenter Fast Unload for DB2 UDB Linux, Unix, and Windows, or Unicenter TSreorg for Oracle. CA officials acknowledge as much. The hope is that customers will like what they see and buy into the rest of CA’s DBMS management vision.