Databases are increasingly becoming critical for business operations, and even a minor glitch can cost millions.
As the volume and complexity of data continue to grow, it’s more important than ever to have robust, functional, and advanced database monitoring tools to analyze its performance.
What is database performance, and what does it entail?
Database performance is the rate and level of access the database provides information to users. Database performance involves thousands of different things; here, we will mention a few fundamental ones, such as:
- How optimally a database manages and uses the hardware resources such as disk space, memory, and cache
- How the database handles seasonal variations in the workload and block contention
- How quick and accurate are data retrieval operations (using indexes)
- How fast and precise is the query processing
- How well the database connects with the external environment
What is SQL performance tuning?
SQL performance tuning is the process that ensures that the SQL statements are optimized to be executed in the shortest possible time.
Tips to increase database performance
We have looked at what makes up database performance. Now let’s look at some tips to increase database performance:
#1. Improve indexes
Indexes are database objects that optimize the search and sorting of data. Properly configured indexes can make a huge difference in the time to insert or extract data from the database. Having a clustered index with a numeric field as a key result helps in improving performance.
Similarly, creating unique indexes significantly increases the performance of queries involving the index columns. When the query engine knows that a field is not repeated, it will stop looking for more occurrences of that field as soon as it finds the first occurrence.
#2. Optimize Queries
Writing effective queries can admittedly be complicated because there are many ways to write queries for the same result, but the efficiency and performance of each query may vary. Also, often the result and performance of queries vary significantly with database and individual use cases.
Though it is recommended to perform queries using compiled queries if the query is often used to fetch records from the database, DBA must use tools capable of monitoring the executed queries and developing optimization methods.
#3. Increase memory
Speed is often a concern when working with databases, and increasing memory can significantly impact it. CPU Cache and Registers cannot be optimized directly by the DBA. It is not a simple task as RAM holds a lot of other information: running program stacks and data, shared cache memory, kernel, and disk buffer cache.
Increasing database performance seeks to keep as much database information as possible in RAM while not affecting other areas of the operating system. Increasing memory and the number of buffers increases the performance by allowing clients to find the information they are looking for in the cache. In systems with more than one disk, we can improve the performance by distributing some tasks between different disks.
#4. Defragment data
As you insert, remove, and update elements of your table, indexes become fragmented, which can harm performance even worse than the absence of indexes.
Therefore it is important to defragment your indexes when they are fragmented, preferably at times of low access to your system, to avoid problems with users.
#5. Review Acess
Database interacts with other systems and hardware, and for this, it requires the right configuration to ensure optimized operation. After identifying any hardware issue or potentially problematic queries, it is important to review access. You can also use performance management tools to examine access patterns.
Why database performance is important and how monitoring software help
All companies offering online services to their customers depend on the good performance of their database. Gone are the days when you only had a few options to choose from; now, thanks to thousands of options, if there are any slight issues in the performance of a service, customers immediately look for the alternative, which can be detrimental to the growth of any business.
Today, efficient database performance also directly impacts customer satisfaction. Thus, monitoring is more than necessary to maintain and increase database performance. In this way, it is possible to determine the necessary procedures that can be carried out before any issues occur in the database.
A DBA needs to be one step ahead and prevent the database from suffering problems that are hard to detect manually, as it requires continuous 24/7 monitoring. Things become worse if the database is large.
Here, good monitoring can come to the aid. Most modern monitoring tools allow you to intuitively measure hundreds of different metrics and historical data, which a DBA can compare and correlate with identifying any performance issues. They also allow you to set custom alerts using different benchmarks and generate performance reports, making it easier to identify problems and potential areas where the database can increase its performance.
As we have discussed, managing and monitoring databases across multiple servers and instances are challenging without the right tools, even for experienced DBAs. Therefore, below we will look at some of the best database monitoring software available in the market:
Paessler
Paessler provides a database monitor that allows you to monitor your entire network and all databases. PRTG uses sensors as its basic monitoring tools, which measure different values within a network. Paessler also lets DBAs generate customizable reports automatically. As of now, Paessler comes with built-in support for various relational databases such as PostgreSQL, Oracle SQL v2, MySQL, and Microsoft SQL v2.
ManageEngine SQL Monitor
ManageEngine is an IT management suite that offers a free SQL health monitoring tool. The SQL monitor provides an intuitive dashboard to monitor different performance metrics. It allows you to automatically discover and monitor all SQL servers on your network.
ManageEngine’s SQL monitoring tool also provides different color-coded alert features, making tracking different metrics easier. ManageEngine lets you monitor all versions of Microsoft SQL.
Solarwinds
Solarwinds is a SaaS platform that offers a complete monitoring solution to monitor and optimize different relational and non-relational databases, including modern cloud-native databases. It offers dashboards to visualize hundreds of crucial databases, queries, and infrastructure metrics.
Solarwinds allows you to monitor both historical and real-time data, which helps identify performance and compliance issues. Moreover, you also get alerts that help mitigate and fix threats and errors promptly.
SentryOne
SentryOne by Solarwinds is an all-in-one monitoring tool for SQL which helps in monitoring SQL servers through a wide range of metrics. SentryOne offers the top SQL view, which shows the whole query history.
Like other major database monitoring tools, it also allows you to set automated alerts based on benchmarks, metrics, or conditions. SentryOne Portal also gives you the option to monitor critical performance metrics from a web browser.
Zabbix
Zabbix is a database monitoring tool that allows you to monitor database performance and monitor configuration changes in the database server. Zabbix offers an autodiscovery feature and supports SNMP and IPMI for data collection. It also offers different templates to monitor databases.
Other features include alerts, integration with third-party utilities, task automation, event correlation, etc. Zabbix currently supports MySQL, Mircosoft SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, CassandraDB, and in-memory databases such as Redis.
Dbwatch
DbWatch is a cross-platform monitoring tool for your entire database ecosystem. DbWatch provides all the performance and health metrics of your server database in a single place.
It allows you to create customizable performance and health reports of any specific instance or combined report of your server. dbWatch supports both AlwaysOn and RAC clustering. It currently allows you to monitor MySQL, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase, MariaDB, and Postgres databases.
DatadogHQ
Datadog is a SaaS database monitoring solution that allows you to track performance metrics, logs, and traces through its customizable dashboards. Datadog offers end-to-end tracing, and automatic error pattern detection helps find bottlenecks, slow-running queries, and other errors in the database.
It lets you automate alerts; however, it has a flexible alert logic to avoid alert fatigue. Datadog allows full API access, which makes monitoring even more efficient.
Red Gate
Redgate is a database monitoring dedicated to monitoring SQL servers. It can be used to monitor databases on-premises or on-cloud. Redgate can be used to monitor SQL servers in batch, and it offers a single interface to get an overview of different performance metrics. Redgate comes with over 65 customizable alert options and gives you the option to create custom performance and server health reports.
Final Words
Database monitoring is much more than just a casual check or creating a backup. With continuously increasing data investing in a dedicated solution to monitor database servers are vital. Choosing the right solution depending on the platform, database, and other particular requirements can not just help you in avoiding bottlenecks, security threats, and compliance issues, but it can also mark a significant difference in your whole application infrastructure.
FAQs
How do you monitor database performance? ›
- Find a Value or Data Column While Tracing (SQL Server Profiler)
- Save Deadlock Graphs (SQL Server Profiler)
- Save Showplan XML Events Separately (SQL Server Profiler)
- Save Showplan XML Statistics Profile Events Separately (SQL Server Profiler)
Database performance monitoring tools are built to monitor business databases constantly in order to provide insight on the current state of the database and how that compares to its past state.
Which is the best software for monitoring? ›- Zabbix.
- Spiceworks Network Monitor.
- Nagios.
- OpManager by ManageEngine.
- WhatsUp Gold.
- Cacti.
- Icinga.
- OpenNMS.
Four types of database management systems
The other three include: hierarchical database systems. network database systems. object-oriented database systems.
- Relational database.
- Object oriented database.
- Hierarchical database.
- Network database.
Which database monitoring metrics are the best indicators of performance? Most performance problems fall into four categories: memory, resource usage, locks and blocks and indexes.
Which tool is used for SQL Server performance monitoring? ›The Performance Dashboard in SQL Server Management Studio helps to quickly identify whether there is any current performance bottleneck in SQL Server.
Which database is best for performance? ›- The Oracle. Oracle is the most widely used commercial relational database management system, built-in assembly languages such as C, C++, and Java. ...
- MySQL. ...
- MS SQL Server. ...
- PostgreSQL. ...
- MongoDB. ...
- IBM DB2. ...
- Redis. ...
- Elasticsearch.
SQL Performance Analyzer enables you to assess the impact of system changes on the response time of SQL statements. Part I covers SQL Performance Analyzer and contains the following chapters: Introduction to SQL Performance Analyzer. Creating an Analysis Task. Creating a Pre-Change SQL Trial.
What is performance analyzer tool? ›What is the Performance Analyzer tool? Windows Performance Analyzer (WPA) is a tool that creates graphs and data tables of Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) events that are recorded by Windows Performance Recorder (WPR) or Xperf. WPA can open any event trace log (ETL) file for analysis.
How to measure SQL performance? ›
Test with SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
You can use a very simple tool, you can find in the menu of SSMS: Query / Include Client Statistics. If you enable this feature, after every query, you can see some statistics about it, the size, the returned size, and how much time it took.
Abstract. We describe and label four types of monitoring—surveillance, implementation, effectiveness, and ecological effects—that are designed to answer very different questions and achieve very different goals.
What is data monitoring software? ›Data monitoring is the process of proactively reviewing and evaluating your data and its quality to ensure that it is fit for purpose. Data monitoring software helps you measure and track your data using dashboards, alerts and reports.
What are seven monitoring tools? ›Recognizing the need is easy, but choosing which monitoring tool or set of tools to use can be difficult. The seven tools I wrote about here – Datadog, Ruxit, OverOps, Rollbar, Sensu, ELK Stack, and Graphite – are worthwhile tools to check out.
What is the most popular database software? ›As of February 2023, the most popular database management system (DBMS) in the world was Oracle, with a ranking score of 1247.52; MySQL and Microsoft SQL server rounded out the top three.
Which is the best database software? ›- 1 Improvado.
- 2 Microsoft SQL Server.
- 3 Postgre SQL.
- 4 My SQL.
- 5 Amazon RDS.
- 6 Oracle RDBMS.
- 7 Razor SQL.
- 9 SQL Developer.
Some examples of popular database software or DBMSs include MySQL, Microsoft Access, Microsoft SQL Server, FileMaker Pro, Oracle Database, and dBASE.
What are the five 5 different types of database structures? ›The network Model, entity-relationship Model, hierarchical Model, object-oriented Model, and object Model are some of the different types of Database Models.
Which software is type of database management system? ›Developed by Microsoft, SQL Server is a relational database management system built on top of structured query language (SQL), a standardized programming language that allows database administrators to manage databases and query data.
What are the 4 most commonly used databases for data analysis? ›Some popular relational database management systems (RDBMS) are Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, and PostgreSQL. Here's a basic schema that shows how a relational database works. To query data in a RDBMS, we use Structured Querying Language (SQL). With SQL we can create new records, update them, and more.
What are the 5 main metrics used in daily management? ›
- Sales Revenue. Tracking sales revenue helps you measure your financial performance. ...
- Customer Acquisition Costs. Customer Acquisition Costs are the expenses related to acquiring new customers. ...
- Customer Churn. ...
- Customer Engagement. ...
- Customer Satisfaction.
- Generate an Actual Execution Plan. ...
- Monitor Resource Usage. ...
- Use the Database Engine Tuning Advisor. ...
- Find Slow Queries With SQL DMVs. ...
- Query Reporting via APM Solutions. ...
- SQL Server Extended Events. ...
- SQL Azure Query Performance Insights.
- Determine monitoring goals. In order to effectively perform SQL Server performance tuning, clarify the reasons you are monitoring the system. ...
- Choose a tool. ...
- Select components and metrics. ...
- Monitor the database. ...
- Analyze data.
Oracle Database is among the most widely used databases in the industry as they support all data types involving Relational, Graph, Structured, and Unstructured information and is hence considered to be one of the best databases available in the market.
What are 10 examples of database packages? ›MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Microsoft SQL Server, MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, Cassandra, MariaDB, IBM Db2.
What is used to improve database read performance? ›Defragment Data
Defragmenting your data is one of the most effective approaches you can take to increase database performance.
The MySQL Query Analyzer enables developers and DBAs to quickly improve the performance of their database applications by monitoring query performance. MySQL Query Analyzer lets you accurately pinpoint SQL code that is the root cause of a slow down.
What is Systimestamp in SQL? ›SYSTIMESTAMP returns the system date, including fractional seconds and time zone, of the system on which the database resides. The return type is TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE .
How does SQL Developer check database performance? ›From Oracle SQL Developer, click View, and select DBA. The DBA Connections are displayed in a tree view. Connect to your Exadata Express service, under the DBA connections. Expand Performance in the DBA connections tree, under your Exadata Express service connection.
What are four 4 performance tools? ›This document outlines four performance management tools: Balanced Scorecard, Baldrige, Lean and Studer. These tools have been identified by the National Rural Health Resource Center as effective methods for managing performance improvement with small rural hospitals.
What is the best performance assessment tool? ›
- Management by Objectives (MBO) ...
- 360-Degree Feedback. ...
- Assessment Centre Method. ...
- Behaviorally Anchored Rating Scale (BARS) ...
- Psychological Appraisals. ...
- Human-Resource (Cost) Accounting Method.
- WebLOAD. ...
- LoadNinja. ...
- HeadSpin. ...
- ReadyAPI Performance. ...
- LoadView. ...
- Keysight's Eggplant. ...
- Apache JMeter. ...
- Micro Focus LoadRunner.
- DBT2 – DBT (Database Test Suite) is a set of database workload test kits. ...
- HammerDB – An open-source and cross platform tool for database load testing.
- Sematext MySQL Monitoring. Sematext is a full-stack observability solution MySQL monitoring capabilities. ...
- Percona Monitoring and Management Tool (PMM) ...
- VividCortex MySQL Analyzer. ...
- MySQL Enterprise Monitor. ...
- Datadog MySQL. ...
- Prometheus and MySQLD Exporter.
There are three basic categories of monitoring; technical monitoring, functional monitoring and business process monitoring.
What are the three popular monitoring methods? ›In the world of monitoring and evaluation (M&E) three approaches can be identified: result-oriented, constructivist and reflexive (see table p.
What are the different types of monitoring systems? ›- System monitoring. ...
- Dependency monitoring. ...
- Integration and API monitoring. ...
- Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) ...
- Web performance monitoring. ...
- Application Performance Monitoring (APM) ...
- Real User Monitoring (RUM) ...
- Security monitoring.
The most obvious example is the burglar alarm. Then there are meters for meas- uring consumption of utilities such as gas and electricity.
Why do we need database monitoring? ›Database monitoring is a vital activity for the maintenance of the performance and health of your database management system. To facilitate monitoring, the database management system collects information from the database manager, its databases, and any connected applications.
Which of these is a popular monitoring tool? ›Icinga is an Open Source server monitoring tool. Icinga checks the availability of servers, network services such as HTTP, SMTP etc. It has a user-friendly user interface. Installation is easy and starts server monitoring immediately.
What are the tools used in monitoring? ›
These tools can include key performance indicators (KPIs), dashboards, checklists, and monitoring plans. Monitoring tools are used to gather qualitative and quantitative data. The choice of tool will depend on the type of information needed, the resources available, and the specific monitoring goals and objectives.
What are smart monitoring tools? ›S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) is a monitoring system for computer hard disk drives that provides for the detection and reporting of various indicators of reliability. It is often used for early detection of potential future failures.
Which of the following are database software? ›Some examples of popular database software or DBMSs include MySQL, Microsoft Access, Microsoft SQL Server, FileMaker Pro, Oracle Database, and dBASE.
Which of the following is an example of a database software? ›MySQL, SQL Server, MongoDB, Oracle Database, PostgreSQL, Informix, Sybase, etc. are all examples of different databases. These modern databases are managed by DBMS. Structured Query Language, or SQL as it is more widely known, is used to operate on the data in a database.
What are monitoring softwares? ›Monitoring software is primarily a type of security and surveillance software installed on an individual system or the corporate network. It can be a standalone application, or function as part of firewall software or hardware, anti-virus software, or an information security software suite.
Which of the following are examples of database management software? ›- Microsoft Access. Microsoft's DBMS, known as Access, combines a graphical user interface, software development tools, and the relational Microsoft Jet Database Engine. ...
- MySQL. ...
- Oracle Database. ...
- MongoDB. ...
- IBM Db2 DBMS. ...
- Amazon RDS. ...
- PostgreSQL. ...
- Apache Cassandra.
Oracle database is the most widely used object-relational database management software. The latest version of this tool is 12c where c means cloud computing. It supports multiple Windows, UNIX, and Linux versions.
Is Excel a database software? ›As a spreadsheet program, Excel can store large amounts of data in workbooks that contain one or more worksheets. However, instead of serving as a database management system, such as Access, Excel is optimized for data analysis and calculation.
Which type of system is most often used for analyzing data? ›Diagnostic Analysis, Predictive Analysis, Prescriptive Analysis, Text Analysis, and Statistical Analysis are the most commonly used data analytics types.
Is Microsoft a database software? ›Microsoft Access is a well-known database management system produced by Microsoft and is part of the Microsoft 365 office suite. Microsoft Access combines Microsoft's relational Jet Database Engine with software development tools and a graphic user interface (GUI).
What are the types of database management system software? ›
Database management systems can be classified based on a variety of criteria such as the data model, the database distribution, or user numbers. The most widely used types of DBMS software are relational, distributed, hierarchical, object-oriented, and network.
What is database software and examples? ›Database software is a software program or utility used for creating, editing and maintaining database files and records. This type of software allows users to store data in the form of structured fields, tables and columns, which can then be retrieved directly and/or through programmatic access.