Monday, November 3, 2014

What's New In Foxhound 3

A new version of the Foxhound database monitor for SQL Anywhere is now available; here's what's new...

1. Release-Defining Features
2. New Features
3. Usability Improvements
4. Behavior Changes
5. Bug Fixes

1. Release-Defining Features    

  1. Support for SQL Anywhere 16 and OnDemand 1.0 target databases has been added.

  2. The new Connection History page shows the performance of a single connection over time.

  3. The Blocked Connections section of the Foxhound Monitor page has been merged into the Connections section.


2. New Features    

  1. The new Change Target Settings page lets you set RememberLastPlan, RememberLastStatement and RequestTiming.

  2. The Machine, Server, Database names have been added to page titles and Alert messages.

  3. The new OS User column has been added to help identify connections: Conn #, ID, OS User, IP, Name.

  4. The new Busy, Wait, Idle columns have been added for each connection.

  5. The Conns connection count column has been expanded to show Parent and Child Conns.

  6. The new total Waiting Time column has been added to the Foxhound Monitor.

  7. The new Last Plan Text column has been added to the connection section.

  8. The new Favorable? YYY column has been added as a link to open the Change Target Settings window.

  9. You can now specify Purge after [xx] day(s) instead of being limited to 1 day, 1 week, 1 month or 1 year.

  10. The new Purge - Off / After xx days column has been added as a link to the Purge section of the Foxhound Options page.

  11. CPU Time calculations have been improved for connections using intra-query parallelism.

  12. The new total Rollback Log and Uncommitted columns have been added to the Foxhound Monitor page.

  13. The separate Req, Commits and Bytes In/Out columns have been gathered into the new connection-level Volume... Req, Commits, Bytes columns.

  14. The new Connection Id String can be used to uniquely identify connections in adhoc queries; e.g., '1-1-20140504073924-692'.

  15. A new emergency patch process is built in to Foxhound for fixing bugs without running a full upgrade.

  16. Five new Alerts have been added:
    Database read-only,
    Database updatable,
    Rollback log usage,
    Uncommitted operations and
    Long uncommitted.

  17. The new DB File and Used columns have been added to the Foxhound Monitor.

3. Usability Improvements    

  1. Major layout changes have been made to the Foxhound Monitor and Sample History pages, including the connection sections.

  2. The new Hide Details and Show Details buttons let you reduce scrolling on the Sample History and Connection History pages.

  3. The new Show More and Show Less buttons let you expand and contract the Last Statement and Last Plan Text connection data.

  4. A new warning about duplicate Foxhound sampling sessions has been added to the Foxhound Monitor page.

  5. The Foxhound option to show the Help frameis turned back on when Foxhound is upgraded, as a reminder that new Help content is available.

  6. Descriptive text has been added to all menu items on the Monitor Options page.

  7. The Peaks since timestamp has radically abbreviated to reduce horizontal scrolling.

  8. Alert email error messages have been improved.

  9. Concise Alert titles are included in all Alert-related messages; e.g., Alert #10: Partner unreachable.

  10. The Foxhound post-setup process has been streamlined.

  11. A new Start Foxhound via default browser shortcut has been added.

  12. There's no more "Can't open Message window log file" message when starting Foxhound.

  13. The Adhoc Schema connection string has been renamed to Foxhound 3 Adhoc Schema - autostart and connect.

  14. The handling of the diagnostic text files produced during the Foxhound Post Setup process has been improved.

  15. Scrolling on the Sample History page is faster.

  16. Color highlighting of Foxhound Monitor data has been improved.

  17. The sampling id and DSN or Connection String name are now appended to all target-related email exception diagnostics.

  18. The Running Time,
    Waiting Time,
    Transaction Time
    and other durations have been abbreviated to make them easier to read.

  19. There are no longer any limitations on the number or names of multiple Extended Edition Foxhound servers.

  20. Some Help topics previously found only in the Foxhound FAQ have been moved to the Help.

  21. The number of processors has been moved from the heading section to the CPU Time xx% of x column, with a link from the Peaks since line.

  22. The HTML generated by Foxhound now works better with the zoom features in Chrome, Firefox and IE.

4. Behavior Changes    

  1. SQL Anywhere 16.0.0.1915 or later is required to run Foxhound 3.

  2. The Cumulative CPU Time and Total Waits columns have been removed from connection-level displays.

  3. The Client Requests, Time columns have been removed from connection-level displays.

  4. The Total, Current Prepares and Rollbacks columns have been removed from connection-level displays.

  5. The Bytes In / Out columns have been removed from connection-level displays and summarized in Volume... Req, Commits, Bytes.

  6. Alert #11 HA failover has been renamed to Alert #11 ServerName change.

  7. The Waiting Req column has been renamed to Unsch Req to reduce confusion with SQL Anywhere documentation.

  8. Alert #14 Waiting Requests has been renamed to Alert #14 Unscheduled Requests.

  9. The Last Statement sort order is only changed when you click on the title text, not the data value.

  10. The security rules are different for connecting to SQL Anywhere 16 target databases.

  11. The dbsrv16 -ufd restart option has been added to the desktop shortcuts to keep Foxhound running.

  12. Foxhound is no longer being extensively tested on Windows XP or IE8.

  13. The Rollbacks column has been removed from database-level displays.

  14. The Checkpoints column has been merged into the Checkpoints, Checkpoint Urgency, Recovery Urgency column set because the values are related.

  15. The Log Writes column has been merged into the Disk Reads, Disk Writes, Log Writes column set because the values are related.

  16. The Free Disk Space Sys, Temp, Log, Other columns have been moved to the heading section because the values don't change very often.

  17. The Throughput... Commits column has been rounded so rates like 0.099/s are displayed as 0.1/s, because the extra precision was not helpful.

5. Bug Fixes    

  1. Support for Snapshot Isolation has been added, thus eliminating the fatal "Cannot convert 'Snapshot' to a decimal" error.

  2. The "Column '@alert11_actual_current_ServerName' not found" error has been fixed.

  3. A bogus Alert #9 Arbiter unreachable is no longer issued for an OnDemand database.

  4. The ALTER MATERIALIZED VIEW statement has been moved after CREATE INDEX on the Display Schema page.

  5. The click here to sort on list has been made version-specific.

  6. A bogus Alert #1 Database unresponsive is no longer issued when Foxhound is started after being upgraded.

  7. The email status is no longer displayed as "Email sent, status unknown." before the attempt to send an email is actually made.

  8. The popup tips for several Alert and AutoDrop criteria fields on the Monitor Options page have been changed to "Percent, 1 to 100".

  9. The minimum input value for the AutoDrop #3 Long transaction duration field on the Monitor Options pages has been changed to 1.0s.

  10. Bad input values entered on the Monitor Options page for integer Alert and AutoDrop criteria fields are now silently changed to the minimum allowed values.

  11. The Foxhound Options - Purge Run report no longer displays 2 as the number of Orphan/Old Sample Set Rows Deleted when no change is reported in the total number of rows.

  12. The Start Foxhound via Chrome shortcut no longer has trouble finding Chrome.

  13. The No Transaction Log curiosity message is no longer displayed for read-only databases.

  14. An error message is displayed instead of suppressing the sample when Foxhound can't call sa_locks() to diagnose a blocked connection.

  15. The handling of invalid SQL Anywhere property values coming from target databases has been improved.

  16. Heartbeat durations are no longer rounded upwards; instead, values between .001s and 0.099s are changed to 0.1s to distinguish them from 0s.

  17. Foxhound no longer tries to AutoDrop the same connection more than once.

  18. The CPOOL=NO connection parameter has been added to the connection string Foxhound uses to connect to target databases.

  19. It is now possible to start Foxhound in Safe Mode when it is run as a service.

  20. Safe Mode startup now marks all timed out sampling sessions as no longer timed out, just stopped.

  21. The Foxhound Options Timeout Retry - never retry setting now works properly.

  22. Concurrent usage of the Global Overrides sections of the Foxhound Options and Monitor Options pages is now properly handled.

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