Contributed by Gary Carter
With our most recent release of Postgres Plus Advanced Server 9.3, EnterpriseDB also made some nifty new updates to our enterprise-class database management console, Postgres Enterprise Manager. If yours is like a lot of other organizations around the world today that are serious about using Postgres as your database platform or you are incorporating it tactically into your existing infrastructure to save costs, then you also need to take a serious look at Postgres Enterprise Manager. With Postgres Enterprise Manager, database professionals can easily manage more and larger databases across the enterprise from a single, highly customizable and easy-to-use graphical console.
As a small or medium size business that makes Postgres the centerpiece of your data architecture, you need the right tools to support the mission critical role that Postgres plays for you. Do you want to be automatically notified if your database or system performance dips below a threshold set by you? Do you want to quickly find performance bottlenecks in large SQL jobs? Do you want to implement best practices for configuring your database to perform at its best?
Performance alerts to IT personnel, the SQL Profiler and Postgres Expert are just a few of the many features available to monitor and maintain the mission critical readiness of your Postgres database serving your business users and your customers around the clock. The new capabilities available in Postgres Enterprise Manager 4.0 include customizable dashboards with the ability to control the look and feel as well as the content of monitoring views. The release also adds a series of new monitoring probes and alerts for Log Files, SQL injection attacks and replication configurations (binary streaming, xDB Replication Server and Slony).
The best news for smaller organizations is that Enterprise Manager comes pre-configured and ready to run out-of-the-box with multiple database and system performance probes reporting back on the health of your database to standard performance dashboards, so your staff is productive immediately.
Large organizations will appreciate the same tools as well as Postgres Enterprise Manager's Capacity Planning module, Customizable Dashboards, Custom Probes, a Log Manager and its distributed enterprise design. Most important for these larger installations is the ability to customize Enterprise Manager to the special needs of the variety of applications that are deployed. Customizable probes allow database administrators to monitor specialized information while customizable dashboards allow information to be monitored in ways that are most effective for your organization's applications and needs. In addition, Enterprise Manager makes managing these larger installations much easier with its ability to effect changes to multiple databases at the same time. For instance, you can specify a standardized profile for database logging and deploy that profile to all your databases at once.
Before Enterprise Manager, there was no comprehensive workbench for performing all of the many important tasks for managing, monitoring and tuning a Postgres database. Users were relegated to using pgAdmin and a variety of other open source tools and custom-built scripts. Collecting, creating and maintaining that collection of tools ate into the time a DBA could then actually apply them to their databases or they could simply manage only a few databases by themselves.
The growing popularity of Postgres signals its growing importance to businesses. That is why we built Postgres Enterprise Manager and other tools to address all aspects of your Postgres database infrastructure. If you haven't already, you should take a serious look at Enterprise Manager and how it can help keep your database(s) running optimally while also managing more databases at the same time.