Systems management software supplier BMC Software Inc, Houston, Texas is hungry for world domination and has announced another bevy of products which it believes will take the market by storm, following hot on the heels of its Web systems management portfolio released in August (CI No 2,977). This time around, it is all about database management. There are six products ready to ship. Some are targeted specifically at the complex world of data warehousing and others have been pinpointed to shore up the problems with database utility management. On the large database-cum-data warehousing side, there is DB Change Manager, which is designed to enable administrators to propagate structural changes and help control versioning. In association w ith this is Patrol DB Integrity, which as it suggests checks the integrity of static and non-static data in a database and actively searches for invalid objects. Patrol DB Stat, meanwhile, is a pure database tool that looks for fragmentation and spots trends and recommends solutions. In companion with this is DB Reorg, which once the latter module is used enables users update and modify the database according with decisions that have been made. All the above tools are shipping now, initially for Oracle databases, but Informix, Sybase and DB/2 support will follow. The final two modules have been tailored for the Informix market and are described as entry-level tools. The first is called Patrol DB Basics Admin, which provides entry levels chema generation and table truncation, for example, for Informix’s OnLine database, and the other is Patrol DB Basics Utilities which provides loading, unloading, recovery and back-up functions. Apart from the six new modules there are also two names for existing products: Patrol DB Voyager – formerly known as MetaDESK – which enables users to browse the data dictionary, objects and data from multiple databases to enable automatic SQL query generation and the presentation of results and Patrol DB Alter is the module that enables administrators to make database changes. These two modules are available now for Oracle, Informix, Sybase and IBM Corp’s DB2/2 for OS/2, OS/400 and AIX.
