Quest Software has announced the addition of predictive diagnostics to its Spotlight on Oracle product, which helps users to find and fix database performance bottlenecks in real time. The new predictive capabilities extend Spotlight’s value and allow users to predict the future performance of SQL statements.

Spotlight on Oracle analyses SQL performance to determine which statements will have the most performance degradation given trends in execution rates and overall database load. Spotlight reports the anticipated growth in resource consumption and the percentage of the total load a particular statement will consume. By finding problematic SQL statements before performance is impacted, corrective actions can be taken without disrupting end users and organisations can more effectively meet end user Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

"In virtually every organisation, the database is core to critical applications, processes and user activities. Therefore, IT must be as proactive as possible when it comes to database performance management," said Guy Harrison, Oracle expert, Quest Software. "The traditional approach of fixing problems as they occur fails to adequately ensure business service levels."

Spotlight on Oracle also has expanded diagnostic capabilities for Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC) environments. Increasingly, organisations running RAC use services to define and control how workload is distributed across the cluster. With new RAC service diagnostics in Spotlight, DBAs can clearly see how each service is distributed across the cluster’s nodes and what resources are being consumed on each node by the various services.