Customer Purchase Justification
PPI Financial

Justification written by a System Developer/DBA working for PPI Financial in Canada:

There is a product called ProActive DBA that I feel we should purchase.   Basically, it is a tool that will allow me to analyze the physical structure of the WinCATS database and optimize it for the best performance.  Right now, we have no real way of accessing the kind of information that this tool can provide. We have to guess and try things to see if they will help. We have to wait for the database to slow noticably before we take corrective measures to speed it up.

ProActive DBA will not only help me determine trouble spots before they become critical (through its analysis and historical reporting features), but will allow me to set up tasks that will monitor known trouble spots and automatically take corrective action to keep the database performing at its
fastest. Also, by using its analysis and historical report functions I can look at the database in a way not available to me before and better enable me to make decisions about what indexes to use, what kinds, etc. In short, it will help me look after the database in a more proactive way instead of the current reactive way.

This tool and the abilities it gives the DBA will be even more valuable in the near future when we move accounting to a SQL Server based Accpac (end of Sept I believe), and when we get the reporting server up and running. I have done some extensive testing on my systems on a copy of the
production database. I asked Jane for a list of both reports and weekly pay activities that she found slow. As you can see from the results below, there was a definite improvement in performance between the unoptimized database, and the one optimized with ProActive DBA.

* time measured in minutes