The Invisible Database

I am always excited to hear about tools being developed that support
SQL Anywhere. SQL Anywhere was designed from the beginning to be very open, and support a wide variety of standard interfaces, such as ODBC, JDBC and ADO.NET. As a result, virtually all development tools that are popular can be used with SQL Anywhere. Even with the large number of development tools, there are other more database specific tools that are often needed by developers and DBAs. While we try to provide many of these tools ourselves such as DBISQL and Sybase Central, there is clearly room for other tools. That is the reason that I was excited when longtime partner Breck Carter (Blog, SQLA, Web) offered to give me a personal demonstration of the latest version of his Foxhound tool.

I believe that Foxhound will be a valuable tool for developers, DBAs as well as data center operations personnel. Integrated into the Foxhound tool are two primary capabilities: Schema Display and Monitoring. Breck has incorporated his no-nonsense approach to things into this tool. The screen is very functional, without a lot of unnecessary look and feel.

The Schema Display is a useful tool for seeing what is in your database, at both the table level, and at the column level. For every table, the CREATE TABLE statement that could be used to create it is given, as well as links to parent and child tables based on FOREIGN KEY relationships. Other information about the table is also displayed, including the number of rows, and the approximate size on disk of the table.

Foxhound also displays each and every column in the database, allowing you to easily find out which table a particular item of data belongs to. In the example below, you can easily see that there are 3 Surname columns in my demo database.

The Foxhound monitor seems designed to pack in as much information as possible in as little space as possible. In the example screen shot below, there are 3 Alerts and one “All Clear” notice to indicate that one of the alerts has cleared itself.

The threshold can be set for each of the 29 possible alert conditions. In the “extreme setting” I used for this screen shot, almost everything generates an alert. Clearly, for production purposes, higher settings would be used. Every Alert and All Clear generates an email such as this one:

Foxhound Alert #16 went into effect for database "SQL Anywhere 11 Demo" at 2010-03-24 15:23:45:
There have been 1 or more disk and log I/O operations per second for 1 or more recent samples.

Recent history...
Mar 24 3:23 PM: Alert #16: There have been 1 or more disk and log I/O operations per second for 1 or more recent samples.
Mar 24 3:13 PM: ALL CLEAR - Alert #26: The number of connections has reached 2 or more for 1 or more recent samples.
Mar 24 3:13 PM: ALL CLEAR - Alert #27: The approximate CPU time has reached 5% of elapsed time or more for at least one connection during 1 or more recent samples.
Mar 24 3:12 PM: ALL CLEAR - Alert #4: The CPU time has been 5% or higher for 1 or more recent samples.
Mar 24 3:12 PM: Alert #4: The CPU time has been 5% or higher for 1 or more recent samples.
Mar 24 3:11 PM: Alert #27: The approximate CPU time has reached 5% of elapsed time or more for at least one connection during 1 or more recent samples.
Mar 24 3:04 PM: Alert #17: The Checkpoint Urgency has been 1% or more for 1 or more recent samples.

Importantly, the All Clear conditions also generate an email. That way, an operator knows that no further action is necessary, and they don’t have to drive to the office in the evening (or middle of the night).

The entire interface to Foxhound is via a web browser. I successfully used Foxhound from both IE and Firefox. The Foxhound server is entirely implemented inside a SQL Anywhere Server taking advantage of the integrated SQL Anywhere web server capability.

Breck has integrated the wisdom of his years of development and consulting experience into a tool that should prove to be a valuable addition to the toolbox of any SQL Anywhere developer, DBA or operator.

Foxhound is in beta test, and according to Breck, will soon be GA. Check out Foxhound’s web page on the Rising Road web site: http://www.risingroad.com/foxhound/