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Review: JInspired JDBInsight 3.0 Early Access (JXInsight)
by Drew Falkman
Introduction
When developing enterprise J2EE application, as I'm sure most
of you have experienced, one of the largest potential
bottlenecks is between the application and the RDBMS server. And of
course, this is also one of the most difficult areas in an
application to test. Traditionally, this is done by testing
the application server, and then testing at the database level.
Which is not only inefficient, but often ineffective.
JInspired's JDBInsight looks to solve our (application's)
problems in this regard.
JDBInsight consists of two pieces: the console and the server.
The server will monitor your J2EE application,
and the console will report and graph the
results through an easy-to-read presentation (see Figure 1). At
it's core, JDBInsight is simply a wrapper to the JDBC drivers
accessing your database. When a JDBInsight driver is first
instantiated, it will initialize the server or agent component.
The agent can then be plugged into the console and the real-time
results can be monitored and snapshots of the data stored for
future analysis.
Where JDBInsight really diverges from other profiling tools is
that it does not simply show what methods are called and classes
are instantiated, but it also shows what specifically is going
on between the application and the database. Just knowing that
query method was called and was slow doesn't provide a lot of
help for developers and administrators trying to isolate such
issues. Let's take a look at JDBInsight in more detail.
Installation and Setup
JDBInsight is extremely flexible in terms of where it can be
used. It supports the following operating systems:
- Windows NT/2000/XP
- Sun Solaris
- Linux
- HP-UX
- IBM AIX (new in 3.0)
- Apple OS X (new in 3.0)
In addition, JDBInsight works with the following application
servers:
- Tomcat
- Jetty
- Resin
- BEA WebLogic
- IBM Websphere
- Bortland App Server/Enterprise Server
- Oracle AS
- Sun One
- JBoss
- Pramati
- According to JInspired, will work with any application server to some degree.
The following enterprise RDBMS platforms are supported:
- Oracle
- MS SQL Server
- Sybase
- IBM DB2
- Any JDBC-compliant database
Installation of JDBInsight on Windows is as straightforward it
should be. Though it looks to be the same in other environments
as well I only installed it on Windows. However, setup is a bit
more of a story. Depending on your application server and RDBMS,
you will need to change the JDBC driver to correspond with the
JDBInsight driver instead of whatever driver you are currently
using. This is generally done using an XML descriptor file,
check your application server docs for details. A word of
caution: the JDBInsight documents (as of EA 8) show numerous
examples of using their Oracle driver, but you will have to
figure it out yourself for others. That having been said, once
that is configured, you have everything you need to start
analyzing your applications.
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