Savant targets feds with Oracle database tool

Savant Corp. is gearing up for a federal sales push of its Oracle Corp. database systems management product.Savant Bethesda Md. markets Q Diagnostic Center for Oracle which is designed to help database administrators track the health of Oracle 7 database environments. Since its release last November the product has been purchased by the Justice Department and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp.

Now Savant is working to broaden its federal reach. The company has several government agencies in the closing process and plans to offer Q Diagnostic Center on the General Services Administration schedule through resellers according to Alec Glorieux corporate strategist with Savant. He said he believes the federal government sector will become 10 percent of his company's sales by the end of this year.

Q Diagnostic Center owes its genesis at least in part to the federal market. Inspiration for the product stemmed from Savant founder William Wynn's experiences on government and commercial projects including his role as a database administrator working on the Army Corps of Engineers Automation Plan project.

Finds Problems FastWynn found that "[Database administrators] did not have a picture of what was going on." Q Diagnostic Center he added helps DBAs "quickly find a problem" as they monitor Oracle-based client/server environments.

Q Diagnostic Center features a graphical overview of the Oracle database environment translating operational statistics on all major subsystems into a series of animated pictorial displays. A funnel-shaped display for example provides information on the average wait time for a database transaction.

Peter Kastner a group vice president with The Aberdeen Group said the graphical interface makes sense at a time when database vendors are "under a lot of pressure" to make their database tools easier to use.

The product also employs a comparative analysis methodology to assess system conditions as opposed to threshold-based methodologies used by other vendors Glorieux said. The comparative analysis tactic diagnoses the root cause of a problem while the threshold approach monitors problems until they become life-threatening to the system Glorieux said.

Q Diagnostic Center also allows administrators to examine PC configurations and check for changes that could be causing problems.

Q Diagnostic Center consists of Q Viewer which provides the graphical overview of the database environment and Q Diagnostic Engines for Oracle and Client PCs. The Diagnostic Engine for Oracle executes on Oracle 7.2 or 7.3 databases. The Client Engine supports

Microsoft Windows 3.1 Windows 95 and Windows NT. The Q Viewer runs on Windows 95 or NT. Pricing starts at $3 900 per database.

Savant plans to broaden Q Diagnostic Center to cover network and operating system monitoring in addition to database tracking. That product is slated for release this fall.