Monday, January 5, 2004
Expand Beyond's Mobile Suite for Microsoft 2.3 reviewed
Posted by Philip Colmer in "SOFTWARE" @ 02:05 PM
Database Browser
Figure 16: Database information.
The database browser is used to view general database information, change database settings or grant database level permissions to a user or role.
Shell Command Center
Figure 17: Shell command center.
This allows you to execute commands in the OS environment on which your database resides. In the configuration under review, this would be Windows, but the Expand Beyond product supports Solaris & Linux as well.
You can enter multiple lines of commands, which is useful if you need to do things like change directory, and then click on the submit button. There are options to turn off the row-based formatting (so you just get the output without the tables), setting a timeout, turning on or off the support for variable substitution and saving the command for future use. As with other output, the results are paginated. Unfortunately, there seemed to be a bug in the software so that I couldn't get the subsequent pages of output to display.
Clicking on the Service Manager tab takes you to Figure 18. Unlike the service management feature built into PocketAdmin (more on this below), this feature is limited to the services used by the SQL server. Rather than just having the links shown, I would have preferred visual confirmation of the current status of the services.
Figure 18: Managing the SQL services.
Tuning Browser
This provides you with a variety of statistics from the system to help you tune or reconfigure parts of the server. Some of the screens are shown below.
Figure 19: Data and procedure cache statistics.
Figure 20: Log statistics.
Figure 21: Cache usage statistics.
It is a shame that Figure 21 doesn't fit properly into the browser. The "Statistic" column could clearly be made narrower, which would help to bring the "Value" column back onto the screen.
