Do you see anything that looks familiar?
1. The transaction log is too big!
"Too big" is too polite a term for a file that fills up the hard drive, and when you run the Purge it grows even bigger!
Foxhound Version 5 solves this problem by adding -m "Truncate Log On Checkpoint" to the dbsrv17 command that starts Foxhound.
Those two little characters "-m" have two huge consequences: First, the transaction log is wiped clean every single time Foxhound takes a checkpoint, and second, you can no longer count on the transaction log being any use at all in a Foxhound database recovery strategy.
If you care about a recovery strategy (and not everyone does) you're left with three choices:
- Take the -m back out and go back to however you used to deal with giant Foxhound transaction logs,
- rely on full backups and give up on restoring recent changes, or
- use the new Mini-Backup and Mini-Restore features to recover Foxhound options and settings... which is (probably) all you need.
Enhancement: The size of the transaction log is automatically limited by the dbsrv17 -m truncate log on checkpoint.
Behavior Change: The transaction log is no longer available for restoring recent changes after restoring a backup.
New Feature: The Mini-Backup process automatically backs up recent changes to Foxhound options and settings.
New Feature: The Mini-Restore process restores your Foxhound options and settings into an empty foxhound5.db.
2. The database is too big!
The Foxhound database file grows at about 100K per monitored connection per hour, which means it gets too big too fast when your database has a lot of connections.
A lot of this space is used by only two columns: Last Statement and Last Plan Text.
Foxhound 5 uses a custom string de-duplication process on these columns to reduce the database size by a lot... sometimes half.
Enhancement: String de-duplication has reduced the size of the Foxhound database file.
Behavior Change: It may take a very long time to upgrade all the data in a very large Foxhound 3 or 4 database.
Behavior Change: The Foxhound database may contain a lot of free space after upgrading a very large database.
3. The purge doesn't work very well!
The original Foxhound Purge process was over-designed, which is a polite way to say it was badly designed.
The Purge process in Foxhound 5 has been completely redesigned and rewritten, with all the
You can set up a separate 24x7 schedule for the Purge, and there are special "Hourly" and "Midnight" buttons to make administration easier.
New Feature: The Foxhound purge process is now fast enough to keep up with database growth.
Behavior Change: The "Purge uninteresting connection data" feature has been removed.
Behavior Change: The Purge process no longer forces extra checkpoints while it is running.
Behavior Change: By default the Purge process starts once an hour, on the hour.
Behavior Change: The purge process no longer puts "Older samples purged at" in the History page.
Behavior Change: The Purge process may now delete all samples from a stopped sampling session.
New Feature: The Mini-Backup process automatically backs up recent changes to Foxhound options and settings.
New Feature: The Mini-Restore process restores your Foxhound options and settings into an empty foxhound5.db.
4. There's no Undo for Reset Peaks!
The "Peaks since" line is one of the most useful features in Foxhound. It lets you jump directly to the most extreme value of each performance statistic on the History page; e.g., to the highest CPU usage, largest Unscheduled Requests, highest Disk Reads and so on.
When the Peaks line is no longer meaningful (say, after a server upgrade) the "Reset Peaks" button clears all the values and starts the peak calculation process over again.
But... if you have ever pressed Reset Peaks by accident you know what "regret" means.
What you want is an "Undo" button; what Foxhound 5 gives you is a "Recalculate Peaks" procedure.
Recalculate Peaks is actually better than Undo: If the old Peaks line contained some values that are now obsolete because the corresponding samples have been deleted, Recalculate Peaks refreshes those values by only looking at samples which still exist.
Enhancement: A procedure to recalculate the "Peaks since" row can be run via ISQL.
5. Foxhound emails don't display properly!
Over the years Foxhound has been plagued by random glitches in the way HTML emails are displayed in Google Mail and other browser-based email clients.
Fixing individual symptoms didn't help because new and different glitches kept cropping up.
To solve this problem once and for all, HTML emails in Foxhound 5 are vastly simplified and the details are delivered as attachments:
New Feature: The Attach files to emails: checkbox has been added to the Monitor Options page.
Enhancement: AutoDrop Notice emails have been enhanced to show connection-level sample data.
Usability Improvement: AutoDropped connection messages now contain links to Connection History pages.
Bug Fix: Alert and AutoDrop emails have been changed to display properly in HTML browsers.
For more information see Foxhound Version 5.
No comments:
Post a Comment