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Pini Dibask
Apr 14, 2020

Introduction

Foglight SQL Performance Investigator (PI) is a powerful workload analysis tool set for database professionals, which brings deep visibility into database performance. It comes with unique features such as historical multi-dimensional analysis, change tracking, performance comparisons, and more. You can read more about Performance Investigator here

SQL Performance Investigator Repository

For many database professionals it’s key to not only have visibility to real-time performance data, but also to historical performance data in order to investigate performance issues which occurred in the past. For some of our customers, long-term retention is essential, and therefore our Foglight PI solution supports up to 2 years of historical data by having its own dedicated repository.

What’s new with the PI Repository?

We are announcing the retirement of the backend Performance Investigator (PI) repository, Infobright, and the introduction of a new enhanced PI repository based on SQL Server. We have worked with our customers and based on your feedback we decided to invest in improving PI product quality and capabilities. The improvements of the new SQL Server PI repository are:

  • Manageability – placing the repository in SQL Server is a familiar platform for many of our Foglight customers.  A significant portion of Foglight customers are using SQL Server for the main Foglight repository.  This gives them the opportunity to deploy and manage the SQL PI repository in a platform they are very adept in.
  • Availability – using SQL Server as the repository affords customers with more options in High Availability and Fault Tolerance using built-in solutions such as Availability Groups and Windows Failover Clustering.
  • Performance - using SQL Server as a repository provides a much better performance compared to the previous repository (Infobright). Navigating in SQL PI dimensions tree is now even faster and smoother than before.
  • Flexibility – placing the repository in SQL Server no longer requires the underlying compute resources to be reserved if virtualized. 
  • Accessibility –a SQL Server-based repository allows the data to be more user-friendly if direct access is needed to the raw data for the purposes of extensibility.

Beginning with the 5.9.5.20 cartridge which was GA’d on March 2020, Infobright will no longer be available, and it will be necessary to move existing agents to the SQL Server PI repository.

We have provided a data migration utility for customers who want to keep their historical performance data.

For customers who use SQL Server/Oracle cartridge with versions earlier than 5.9.5.20 and would like to continue use Infobright as a backend PI repository, we will keep supporting this configuration until March 2021.

Additional Resources

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