Additions to the Visual DBA Suite

Three new Visual DBA (VDBA) Suite tools have been added:

• Visual Database Objects Differences Analyzer
• Visual Configuration Differences Analyzer
• Export Assistant

Visual Database Objects Differences Analyzer

The new Visual Database Objects Differences Analyzer (VDDA) tool allows you to compare groups or individual Ingres database objects, either in the current installation or saved into a snapshot file. It also allows you to visualize the differences in the database objects.

The following options are supported:

• Performing the comparison either at the installation level (that is, comparing any database objects present in an installation) or at the schema level (that is, comparing objects owned by a given user within a database). In both cases, you can limit the comparison to certain object types.
• Saving such groups of database object definitions into snapshot files for later comparison with current or other saved database object definitions. This allows comparisons within an installation over time.

The list of differences generated by VDDA includes one line for each difference in a property of the given database object. The bottom status line indicates the number of objects with differences and the number of differences found in the comparison.

For more information, see online help for VDDA.

Visual Configuration Differences Analyzer

The new Visual Configuration Differences Analyzer (VCDA) tool allows you to compare the configuration information for two Ingres installations. VCDA enables you to take snapshots of the installation and compare these snapshots with either a snapshot taken at some point in the past or with a configuration snapshot taken on another machine.

For example, after you install Ingres and have tuned the configuration to meet your needs, take a snapshot of the configuration. If you encounter problems with the installation later on, take another snapshot of the configuration and compare it to the earlier snapshot to determine if any configuration changes have contributed to the problem. Keep an on-going record of configuration changes by taking a snapshot of the installation each time you change its configuration.

VCDA snapshots contain information taken from the config.dat file, the symbol table, and the vnode database, as well as environment variables set at the system and user level.

Specifically, VCDA allows you to:

• Save a snapshot of the current installation configuration into a file
• Compare two snapshot files, or the current installation with a saved snapshot
• Restore selective groups of configuration parameters from a saved snapshot

VCDA lists the differences with an associated icon that distinguishes between those parameters that are different and those that exist in one snapshot but not in the other.

VCDA uses information from the config.dat file, which typically contains parameters that apply to the local host name only. However, if you want to concatenate the contents of all your config.dat files into a single config.dat file to distribute across multiple environments, VCDA manages this situation as follows:

• The host name under which a snapshot is saved becomes part of the snapshot information.
• If VCDA detects that host names other than the snapshot host name are managed within the config.dat information of the snapshot, VCDA displays them.
• A host name mapping option is available in that situation, so that VCDA can compare the additional host names' configuration parameters. If this option is not used, the parameters are compared, including their host names (that is, only parameters that are identical for the same host name in the two snapshots are considered identical).

For more information, see online help for VCDA.

Export Assistant

The new Export Assistant complements the existing Import Assistant in both design and function. The Export Assistant is a wizard designed to simplify the task of exporting Ingres (or Enterprise Access) data into external files. Specifically, you can export data into the following file formats:

• .csv (and other delimiter formats)
• .xml
• .dbf
• fixed widths

The Export Assistant is accessible from the Start menu and from the Ingres Visual Manager and Visual DBA tools. You can also invoke the Export Assistant from the command line.