Moving away from IMAGE? If your plans don't include Marxmeier Software's Eloquence, then the database administrator is in for a lot of changes, or it's time to turn over the reins to somebody else to drive the database stage. While Eloquence has been crafted to work like IMAGE, the other database choices need different management tools. Several names familiar to 3000 managers have stepped up to offer what's needed.

Bradmark, which has a long history providing DBGENERAL for IMAGE/SQL, is providing Surveillance for Sybase version 3.0.4. Key enhancements include Sybase MDA table monitoring, Adaptive Server Enterprise 15 native support, Windows Event Log Monitoring, Windows Service Monitoring, and Enhanced User Defined Collections.

Bradmark says it worked closely with Sybase on development; the two companies inked a pact in 2005 that lets Sybase sell the Bradmark products directly. Surveillance for Sybase made its debut last year.

The Bradmark product "provides a real-time view of database activity and detailed performance metrics for the Sybase ASE environment," according to a company release. The software gives detailed statistics on session and process activity, locked sessions, batch contention and file IO, all of which can be viewed simultaneously for multiple databases. Surveillance is configured to look for error conditions or performance issues and send alerts to the database admin team as well as to initiate scripts to correct problems.

Sybase isn't as popular a choice for SQL databases as Microsoft's SQL Server or Oracle. The company's Mark Westover said his firm, which was once one of the Big Four of SQL (the others were Informix, Oracle and SQL Server) "has consciously walked away not from markets, but parts of the whole solution – and enabled our partners to offer professional services to fill in the remainder of the whole solution."

In that vein of thought, the 3000 community has vendor partners serving the more popular SQL markets, too.