Changing Gear

Following Embarcadero’s acquisition of CodeGear, the company is re-positioning its products under the DatabaseGear brand. Kay Ewbank finds out more.

HardCopy Issue: 42 | Found In: Database | Published: 01/11/2008 | Last Revision: 06/07/2010

One man who should know what is happening at Embarcadero as regards the DatabaseGear brand is Philip Rathle, the company’s Senior Product Manager of Change Management Solutions. Kay Ewbank talks to him about the developments.

Philip Rathle, Senior Product Manager of Change Management Solutions at Embarcadero, talks DatabaseGear.

Kay: So what are your plans for the future of the DatabaseGear range of products? Philip: Having products for both communities means we can increase our ways of connecting developers with those working with databases, providing new ways for them to increase productivity and quality. We will continue our track record of aggressively investing into the DatabaseGear products. This means staying current with the latest DBMS releases, adding features to address our customers’ changing needs, and bringing new innovations to market. We are also planning to add to the ways that customers can make use of synergies between products. Kay: Your DatabaseGear products have a strong cross-DBMS theme. For example, your literature describes Change Manager as the only database change management tool that provides deep cross-DBMS support from a single user interface, across all three areas of database change management: schema, data, and configuration. Is cross-platform support an important feature for your customers? Philip: If you go back to the early database management tools Embarcadero developed, what happened was that we started on one platform – for example, we developed RapidSQL for Sybase. RapidSQL gives database developers a way to produce high-quality SQL code faster. Oracle DBAs saw what it could do, and told us it would be great to have a tool like that. So the cross-platform support developed as a result of customers wanting it. With Change Manager, slightly over half of the people we initially sell it to use it for just one DBMS platform, but close to 40 per cent at some point use it for other platforms, so the cross platform support is a significant factor. One reason for the success is that we do cross platform properly: we don’t just offer an ODBC driver and call that cross platform; we provide native drivers that understand the database servers at a deep level. Kay: You’ve recently released a new version of Change Manager that provides cross-DBMS support from a single user interface across three areas of database change management: schema, data, and configuration. If you had to pinpoint the key advantages Change Manager offers over rival products, what would they be? Philip: Well, I’d start with the cross platform support, because not a lot of products do it at a deep level. Next, I’d go on what our customers have reported they really like, which is the degree to which they can zoom in and out of objects. If you want to archive a complete database with everything such as schemas, table spaces, and link servers, that’s fine. However, you can also zoom down and capture the schema, ignore server objects, or decide which specific objects you want to archive. Kay: Are you launching other new products in the DatabaseGear range? Philip: Yes - we have two other new products. The first is DB Optimizer which analyses the database to find problems that are having a negative effect on performance. You can point it at a database and get a graphical and tabular view of what’s happening on the system, see what SQL statements are running and the effect they have. It also has the ability (only in Oracle so far) to take a piece of SQL and tune it in terms of suggesting ways to improve it, indexes that you might want to use and so on. Another new product comes straight out of the work we did helping customers with their modelling environment. It’s a data mart front-ended by a search engine. Customers get data into storage such as a data mart, then want to make it available to analysts. We developed ER/Studio Portal in response to customer needs for a simple-to-use portal, and as you can tell from the name, we developed it with close input from ER/Studio customers. ER/Studio is our data modelling tool that customers can use to reverse-engineer, analyse, and optimise existing databases.