As we approach Christmas 2021, after what has been a difficult couple of years for us all, we thought we should take the opportunity to look back at what we have achieved with DBmarlin, over the last year. Along the way, I may mention some things that may come along in the future – please don’t view these forward-looking thoughts as anything definitive. Improvements come along when they are ready, and priorities can, and frequently do change. All I can say is that we do take notice of all feedback we receive, and especially that from customers! So don’t be shy.

It is just over a year since DBmarlin was launched, you can read the story of why we did it, here and we have kept to our original plan of issuing monthly updates. In fact, in the last couple of days we have released version 1.11, which headlines with the provision of support for IBM Db2.

Growing platform support

We now support the five leading relational database technologies, as well as one other. From our beginnings when we launched, we covered the top four: Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL and PostgreSQL. Over the year, we added CockroachDB, (a customer request) and now IBM Db2. And these all show similar information in the same UI, in the same way, so is of course great for teams that support many different database technologies.

We launched with a Linux installation, and rapidly added Windows to the supported platforms. Over time we have expanded further, and now support Red Hat, Centos, Ubuntu and Amazon Linux, and Windows 2012R2 and above. Of course, if you have a different flavour of O/S, then just let us know and we can see what may be involved for support. You can check out our docs for the exact versions here.

“I can’t stress enough how grateful we are for what the DBmarlin team has been able to achieve and in such a short period of time!”

Michael Burrei CEO - Academic Excellence

Early feedback from customers was that it would be really helpful to see operating system information in the same timelines as the database charts. We took that on board too, and introduced our simple host monitoring early on.

Improvements driven by customers

Over the year, we have made several sets of improvements to our execution plans, and the feedback we have received on the latest set of changes is very positive, so maybe we have addressed most of the concerns that were expressed.

As you may imagine, our list of enhancements and additional functionality is growing far quicker than we can ever address them. Near the top of many peoples list is Alerting. We’re very aware of that. To help us, can I do a bit of instant research – what mechanisms would you like us to provide for alerts? We will naturally have an email interface and we know many of you are fans of Slack. Which others would you like to see? Let us know (no promises of course).

“DBmarlin gave us immediate value. It highlighted exactly where our code was inefficient and what we needed to do to fix it.”

Stavros Antoniou Software Developer - EnergyLogix

We added the Knowledge base, with links out from DBmarlin only a couple of months ago. It proved to be a major exercise doing the research for over 1000 different wait events, so we hope that it is proving useful to you all. We want to ensure DBmarlin guides you to solutions, rather than just reporting problems, and there will be more features in this vein coming along the track.

DBmarlin 2021 timeline

New customers and partners

In the year, we have acquired customers in all four corners of the world, and also now have partners in both North and South America, the UK and Europe. That does leave some gaps, so if you are based in Asia, or Australasia, or indeed anywhere in the world, and are interested in becoming a DBmarlin partner, then just drop us a line. We have spoken to many, many people around the globe, have made lots of friends, and hope to continue the conversations we have started into 2022.

“The improvements realised by our clients that have considered and taken up DBmarlin is instantly impressive.”

Justin Pounds Head of Business Development - Kedron UK

Merry Christmas 🎄

It just remains for me to wish you all a Happy Christmas and a great New Year.

Let’s speak again soon.