Quest Spotlight Goes Enterprise

I got a press release in my inbox today that Quest’s enterprise version of Spotlight for SQL Server has just been released. Now, I know that quite a few of you are aware that I’m not fond of Spotlight as anything more than a nice screensaver, so I’m going to give you tell you what you need to know about the new version.

First of all, it’s really getting annoying that companies put the word ‘enterprise’ on a product without having any enterprise features to back it up. One of the problems is that an enterprise is so hard to define that they can get away with tagging anything with that moniker and get away with it.

I wouldn’t exactly say that Quest is trying to pull a fast one by calling Spotlight an enterprise-level product, but I will say it doesn’t live up to its name just yet. I believe the name represents the result they hope to achieve in the next couple years more than what the product stands for at this moment. It’s a framework they’re trying to achieve, and this is just the first release.

To date, the biggest problems with Spotlight have been performance related. These performance problems stem from bad design decisions at every stage of the game. Some of them have been fixed in this release and some haven’t. For starters, Spotlight allows as many workstations to connect to the server as the server will allow. That means that if you have a server with severe performance issues you can connect with Spotlight to diagnose the issue… so can your partner, and your boss, and the PM in charge of the project. And what do you think that many admins connected to an already bleeding server will do for performance? I’ll tell you what it will do… it will keep anyone from being able to get anything done, even in Spotlight, and the server will just die.

The new version of Spotlight actually fixes this issue by setting up a mid-tier that connects to the server, and all of the clients connect to the mid-tier instead. This is a much better way to do this, and it’s good to see Quest is finally getting the message. Another problem Spotlight has always had is you could only view one server at a time in the console. The new version allows you to represent each server as a colored spot on the console, and if you have an issue, the color changes and you can click on it to see the details of the problem.

Those are the problems fixed by the new version, but there are still some of the old design flaws around. It’s difficult to say exactly whether they’re actually separate issues, or whether they’re products of each other. See, Spotlight installs a work database on each server, and that database works almost entirely off of stored procedures that are poorly written and take a very large part in dragging down a dying system. I really can’t count the number of times I’ve tried to use Spotlight on a server with severe performance problems, and I couldn’t even get Spotlight to connect to the server because of the extra load it puts on the system. These issues seem to appear mainly in disk queues, and as it turns out, that’s mainly when you see these issues with Spotlight. When the server is more disk bound, Spotlight seems to just exacerbate the issues in the way it stores info in its work database.

I know what you’re thinking… how do I know the stored procedures are so bad? I mean, it seems that a product like Spotlight would encrypt its procedures to keep people from stealing their code. Well, as it turns out, that’s correct… Quest does encrypt the stored procedures in the Spotlight work database. The problem is, there are plenty of procedures out there for decrypting stored procedures and they’re easy to come by, and free. Just go to yahoo and type in something like “decrypt stored procedures in SQL Server 2000” and see what you come up with. You may have to refine your search a little, but you should find something very quickly. Then start decrypting your Spotlight work database and you’ll see that they didn’t encrypt the procedures to keep anyone from stealing them, but more to keep from being embarrassed.

In all though, Quest is aware of the performance issues surrounding Spotlight, and they’re finally working to fix them. This enterprise release, though it may not be an actual enterprise release just yet, gives me hope that they may be able to bring some dignity back to Spotlight after so many years of pathetic performance. I am encouraged though.

I’m going to close with one more thought that I think is really important. I’ve talked to various officials at Quest about the Spotlight problem a number of times, and they almost always answer my attacks by saying they must be doing something right, because it’s one of their most popular tools.

Well, I have no doubt that that’s true. And knowing that not only has this extremely poor product been so popular for so long, and that Quest has known about these issues for years now, really tells me something about how much Spotlight customers actually rely on it for production issues… it also tells me something about Quest’s commitment to its customers. Then again, if nobody’s using it, who’s there to complain?