DBArtisan vs. Oracle Enterprise Manager

DBArtisan is excellent for large institutions with multiple mission-critical databases. It works especially well for cross-platforms RDBMS support. I am mostly familiar with Oracle, but less familiar with SQL Server and Sybase. So I certainly appreciate having a similar interface that allows me to manage those less familiar RDBMS, as this will mean a smaller learning curve. DBArtisan is mostly for DBAs, it is not suitable for developers, I believe the vendor has a separate tool for that

Incentivized

I wish I had an option to give it a 9.5 :) OEM Cloud Control is very well suited if you have a system with multiple implementations of Oracle Database Enterprise Edition. If you are willing to pay for the huge license cost which is typical with Oracle, then you will love to use OEM Cloud Control to monitor your entire ERP solution including web servers, applications, network, storage, and physical servers. It is not worth the buck if your's is a small implementation. Your DBA's should be able to work without depending on OEM Cloud Control.

Incentivized

• The free trial offer was great for me to test the software before purchasing it.
• It monitors queries well and shows resource allocation, as well as detailed stats for each running query.

Incentivized

• Oracle Enterprise Manager is a "one stop shop" for all of our management needs. This is helpful because it minimizes the management of the management software itself. There are less upgrades and connectivity issues to handle. And there are "plug-ins" for additional products we use like Blue Medora's one for PostgreSQL.
• Managing administrative jobs can be burdensome in a shop with dozens of servers and databases. OEM Cloud Control makes it easy since you can view all the jobs for all servers in one place. It is easy to filter on jobs with problems or the like so that you can quickly look at the logs and fix the issues.
• Tuning PL/SQL is much easier using OEM Cloud Control. Most DBAs are familiar with trace files and TKPROF, but not having to do those things at a command line smooths the process out. The graphical interface makes it easier to show developers exactly what the issues are. This makes for less finger-pointing and quicker resolution of performance problems.
• Proactive management is easier using OEM Cloud Control. Before having the gui, I had a collection of scripts that I would have to install on each database server, then set up cron jobs to run them. When Oracle was upgraded, those scripts might have to be updated on each and every server. OEM Cloud Control has those things built in. You can choose exactly which metrics are important to you. And you can keep performance graphs up all day on a second monitor to let you instantly see when something might cause a problem.

Incentivized

• DBArtisan lacks a utility that does schema or object comparisons, which is a feature in Toad. I find this useful in some situations where I need to find out all differences between Prod and QA for a given schema, for example. DBArtisan doesn't seem to have the capacity to do this.
• I wish there was a way for the tool to warn me before performing a long-running task. For example if I want to re-organize a large table or rebuild an index for a table with millions of rows, it should warn me before executing it, so that I may choose to do it in a different way. Sometimes if I let these long operations run for too long, it freezes the program and crashes DBArtisan. I would rather run it on the DB server, and run it in background so that it doesn't time out, if DBArtisan gave me a warning before execution.
• Idera has taken over Embarcadero. I never heard of or dealt with Idera for support. I don't know if they have same the quality support as before.

Incentivized

• We also use OEM to monitor SQL Server. However, OEM only provided limited features for SQL Server. It would be nice if we can schedule backup jobs for SQL Server in OEM.
• The ability to run SQL queries. You can't run queries in OEM. I have to go to SQL Developer or SQL PLUS to run. queries.

Incentivized

It's great! It does everything and anything you would want it to do. It can monitor things which doesn't comes out of the box by adding plug ins to it, for example, you can even monitor Oracle GoldenGate Replication by adding a plug-in to OEM Cloud Control.

Incentivized

I have never tried their support so the number above is meaningless

Incentivized

I still rate OEM as a must-have tool for central management of Oracle fleet. The pros and cons of the product is prominent. Meanwhile, I also acknowledge that OEM was design about a decade ago. At that time, it did not have the landscape we have today, such as cloud, DEVOPS, machine learning, etc. I hope in future releases, the design will incorporate those features.

Incentivized

DBArtisan does not have an in-depth performance analyzer for databases.

Incentivized

Kibana from Elastic is another monitoring tool that claims to provide very similar information to OEM. It seems to be an information tool rather than a tool that can actually make changes within a database. I think Kibana is more robust for hardware versus database software so it is more suited to that purpose and does to compare to the Oracle Database monitoring attributes of OEM.

Incentivized

• While it is expensive, it saves us a great deal of time in getting a lot of DB work done.
• The front end is reasonably powerful and significantly more polished than any of the free alternatives

Incentivized

• Positive: Alerting features. Without this we would have to be a 24x7 shop with someone always manning the helm. With the alerting feature we can define levels of alerts and only get the most pressing alerts sent out.
• ROI: OEM is free, so the ROI is whatever you make of it.

Incentivized