Sliding back in time

Isn't August supposed to be the down month? Everyone is on vacation? Well not for this guy. Apparently a few people decided it was change jobs month. I have never been one to shy away from change so I am excited about new beginning but filling the voids has been fun but exhausting. For one I am currently guiding the DBArtisan and Rapid SQL teams personally. These are great teams and they are anxious to put out great product. As such the team has rewarded the world and me with DBArtisan 8.5.5 which should be on the website tomorrow, and I will blog more about then.

Anyhow with all these distractions I haven't had a chance to blog about Performance Center 2.5. The first thing you will notice is it has that new car smell. Er it looks new all over. Some might say the move to 2.5 is like going from VW to a BMW. Marketing has done a great job on detailing the benefits of Performance Center so I won't repeat that. However when you start the Performance Center UI find the Zoom slider and "Current" button on the toolbar.



These two controls do amazing things that were not possible in previous versions. The Zoom actually lets you move around in the last few hours of activity. The graphs will all reflect this change. Clicking current lets you go back to any point in time and the information on the screens adjust to that time. So if someone asks you what was happening last night at 2am when my batch failed, then you can quickly check it out. You can then zoom around to see what lead up to problem as well. Possibilities are endless and if database performance awareness is important to you then this is a good time to test drive this tool.