Exceptions Perspective
You can probably guess what this perspective highlights:
exceptions. It is a nice, clean display of JDBC errors,
including the SQL code and stack trace. See Figure 5.
Tracing, Console and Other Features
In addition to the standard views above, JDBInsight also
provides an additional way to get data. I find the tracing feature
quite nice. Using tracing, you can do the following:
- Concurrency monitoring allows for analyzing
what happens to the application at the transaction and SQL level
under different loads. Detecting maximums and looking for
performance slow downs.
- Non-database issues within a transaction
can be monitored and graphically analyzed, allowing the
developer to see where some code-based performance issues may
lie.
- Nested transactions can be seen visually in
terms of their performance time.
- Debugging information can be viewed,
including object id's and other data that could be critical in
finding code and run-time application issues.
JDBInsight has a command-line console application. This can be
helpful when analyzing multiple machines over a network. This
profiler returns detailed information in a highly readable
(obviously text-based) format. This feature is great for those
who prefer command-line operation, for getting quick checks or
potentially even automating some process from external
applications, and basically all of the other reasons many
developers prefer these types of interfaces.
There are even more features available in this application - and
the depth that the aforementioned features go needs to be seen
to be understood.
Conclusion
Having been developing J2EE and enterprise applications for a
number of years now, I'm surprised that JDBInsight is in a class
by itself. Virtually every enterprise application can benefit
significantly from just this sort of analysis. The licensing
fees for JDBInsight are extremely reasonable, enough for the
budgets of independent developers and a pittance to the Fortune
1000 companies who would likely discover a significant return on
investment almost instantly after deploying this application. I
would recommend this application to anyone who develops J2EE
applications of any scope that use JDBC.
Drew Falkman is
the author of the JRun Web Application Construction Kit and co-
author (with Ben Forta) of Reality ColdFusion: J2EE Integration,
both published by Macromedia Press. Over the past 6 years, Drew
has developed over 150 Web applications in all sizes using
ColdFusion and Java. Currently Drew consults, speaks at events,
writes for numerous publications, and teaches courses at
Portland State University. His latest project through his
consulting company, Veraison LLC, was a real-time cattle auction
using Flash Remoting and Flash Communication Server. In
addition, Drew is a member of Team Macromedia, a certified
ColdFusion Developer and a certified Macromedia instructor.
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