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IDERA SQL Doctor vs Quest Foglight for Databases comparison

IDERA and Quest Software are both solutions in the Database Development and Management category. IDERA is ranked #35, while Quest Software is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.2. IDERA holds a 0.6% mindshare in DDM, compared to Quest Software’s 8.0% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of IDERA users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Quest Software users who would recommend it.
IDERA SQL Doctor
Read 1 IDERA SQL Doctor review
  • 107 Views
  • 52 Comparison Views
100% willing to recommend
Quest Foglight for Databases
Read 14 Quest Foglight for Databases reviews
  • 1,902 Views
  • 700 Comparison Views
93% willing to recommend
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary
We performed a comparison between IDERA SQL Doctor and Quest Foglight for Databases based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Oracle, Quest Software, Nutanix and others in Database Development and Management.

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To learn more, read our detailed Database Development and Management Report (Updated: June 2025).
Buyer's Guide
Database Development and Management
June 2025
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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

IDERA SQL Doctor
Ranking in Database Development and Management
35th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Quest Foglight for Databases
Ranking in Database Development and Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Database Development and Management category, the mindshare of IDERA SQL Doctor is 0.6%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Quest Foglight for Databases is 8.0%, up from 7.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Database Development and Management
 

Featured Reviews

MR
By capturing performance issues when they happen, we do not miss crucial data
* Indexing and locking analyses * The ability to generate optimize scripts. * The prioritized recommendations are nice to have. Furthermore, you can have multiple scans archived when comparing the tracing from a baseline perspective. Two scans can give us insights concerning the difference between a good and a bad situation.
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Stuart Dairiki - PeerSpot reviewer
Empowers efficient database monitoring and performance troubleshooting with powerful workload analysis
I find it extremely helpful to use Foglight to triage any database issues, specifically performance issues using what Foglight calls PI investigator. It is a very powerful workload analysis tool that helps me understand where bottlenecks are. It allows me to see performance issues as end users report them. It can save time and effort when doing root cause analysis. It enables me to obtain information quicker and easier compared to manually compiling it. Foglight provides us with a near-real-time activity database. It's not 100% real-time. It has less than a minute latency. It allows us to see performance issues as end-users report them. We started seeing benefits pretty much immediately. We use Foglight to display intensive databases. However, it's not something we monitor regularly. It's only something we kind of dig into as we troubleshoot and triage issues. It does help us determine potential IT help issues. When we use Foglight, we find it helps drill down holistically into potential bottlenecks. It helps us to see what is going on in the database. Foglight allows us to monitor multiple database platforms. We use, for example, Oracle, SQL Server, Postgres, Amazon Redshift, and SAP HANA. It gives us insight into our entire landscape of production workloads in near real-time. The solution saves costs when performing root cause analysis. It can save time and effort when doing root cause analysis. It allows us to obtain information quicker and easier than by manually compiling information.
Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"You can have multiple scans archived when comparing the tracing from a baseline perspective. Two scans can give us insights concerning the difference between a good and a bad situation."
"The alarms alert proactively if there are any potential or ongoing issues with the databases that we support. That means we can take preventive or corrective action before the issue becomes a big issue. And the SQL PI features enable us to drill down into performance issues in our databases so that we can improve performance, which is important."
"The most valuable feature is the in-depth capability SQL Performance Investigator provides. It allows you to drill down to the smallest detail that occurs on our platform. It does a highly detailed and atomic follow-up of what one wants to look for in relation to time and our different instances."
"Foglight's Change Tracking capabilities are another huge feature. It is wonderful to be able to do that. People don't realize the amount of information that Foglight gathers from a given server or instance. It gets down to the version of SQL, the disk array, everything that's there. Any change that's made, any upgrade to SQL, shows up on the dashboard almost immediately. You don't know how much time you save just having a tool in your back pocket that does that for you."
"We can visualize all the different types of DB servers that we are monitoring in a single pane of glass. It uses a 360-degree overview of the database, for each of those databases that we are monitoring. That includes what kind of resource utilization is happening and what kind of DB parameters are getting monitored, as well as the different types of DB parameters that are being offered for each database type."
"We went from basically 30% coverage of our production environment to 100% coverage."
"It can save time and effort when doing root cause analysis. It enables me to obtain information quicker and easier compared to manually compiling it."
"The ability to monitor multiple database platforms streamlines our database operations. The single pane of glass is what we were really after when we picked Foglight. We knew we wanted something that could monitor cross-platform because it does save a lot of time to use the same tool. The one thing that I like with Foglight is that we don't have to install anything locally, like agents, directly on the database servers. That was also a big seller because it simplifies things."
"The real-time activity screens are also helpful... if there is something that is running slowly, we can eliminate the database as being an issue and perhaps look at the server, network activity, or something outside of the realm of the database as being the issue."
More Quest Foglight for Databases pros
 

Cons

"SQL Doctor should be improved in Availability Groups, mirroring, and clustering analyses. We mostly see index and query plan analyses. It should be broader than this."
"Quest must release a Spanish version. That's critical because not everyone speaks English in Latin America. It's an excellent product, so it's super important that they offer the application and customer service in Spanish."
"The data model needs improvement when it comes to creating custom reports. That is an area where it needs a bit of improvement. Foglight gathers a lot of information around our databases as part of its monitoring. While I know all this information is in there, trying to pull the metric we want out for custom reports is sometimes hard to find. One nice thing about Foglight is that you can create custom dashboards, which you can easily convert to reports. We would be doing a lot more of that if it weren't for the challenging data model."
"Foglight does have a component that allows you to look at things in real time, but it's not as friendly or as efficient in terms of responsiveness as Quest Spotlight is. Foglight might be lacking in this department."
"Better communication and alerts regarding the transaction logs getting full would also be beneficial. What I have noticed is that if the log files on the SQL server are full, we cannot log in and have to do some cleanup on the Foglight DB. It would be good if they could monitor that and alert us when it is getting too full."
"The monitoring capabilities for Postgres should be at par with SQL Server. This is the area where we push back on our Quest representative. We want more insights into Postgres."
"When we decided to go with Foglight, a lot of people stopped using the diagnostics part because it was very intimidating... They still won't use it because they feel it's too intimidating. They will open something up and not know what to do. It's not very user-friendly. You have to click on a lot of stuff to find the information."
"I would like the rule development code to be made available so we don't always have to be referred to professional services for custom solutions. For example, if we want to exclude certain databases from a particular rule, we shouldn't have to go to support and to professional services for that solution. If the code and syntax were available, we have resources that could quickly turn something like that around."
"It would be amazing if they could enable the 'Performance Investigator' functionality across all database platforms."
More Quest Foglight for Databases cons
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"The price is worth it, if you have the time to go through the information."
"Compared to the other tools on the market, Foglight is okay in terms of pricing and licensing."
"The price of Foglight could be a little more competitive in Chile, and it should be lowered for long-time customers— at least by 20 percent. Sometimes the price is a limitation. We have seven instances and nearly 5 million users. If Quest Foglight could reduce its prices for the clients that have been with it for a long time, we would be able to have more instances."
"This is like the "Cadillac" of performance monitoring software. It's not cheap... I am currently with a company that I was able to convince that the product is worth the cost."
"It is cost-effective. With our EA, it is really based on the scale of our database environment. We found the Quest team to be reasonable and flexible when it comes to pricing and scaling of licenses."
"Pricing is very reasonable. We were able to construct a pretty easy contract with Quest, who were very easy to work with and very amenable to what we are trying to do. It worked out well for us."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
14%
Computer Software Company
12%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Quest Foglight for Databases?
The pricing is palatable. We've already done one renewal and we are in our second contract. We're happy thus far.
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What needs improvement with Quest Foglight for Databases?
It would be amazing if they could enable the "Performance Investigator" functionality across all database platforms. I've been talking to their product development team about enhancements that I wo...
See all answers
What is your primary use case for Quest Foglight for Databases?
I primarily use the solution for database monitoring, specifically for Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Postgres, SAP HANA, and AWS Redshift.
See all answers
 

Comparisons

No data available
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Compared 7% of the time
More Quest Foglight for Databases Competitors
 

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide
Database Development and Management
June 2025
IDERA SQL Doctor reportDownload IDERA SQL Doctor product report
Buyer's Guide
Quest Foglight for Databases
June 2025
Quest Foglight for Databases reportDownload Quest Foglight for Databases product report
 

Overview

SQL Doctor helps database administrators to tune SQL Server performance, security, and disaster recovery via expert recommendations in physical, virtual, and cloud environments - including managed cloud databases. Unlike its competitors, it provides display health of all SQL Servers, generation of ready-to-run SQL scripts to optimize and undo optimization, limiting of analysis to specified databases, applications, and performance categories, and real-time, as-needed, and scheduled checkups.

IDERA

Foglight identifies and resolves performance issues across your applications, databases and virtual environments. The Foglight family of products easily integrates with your existing tools, so you can monitor and analyze data from almost any source across your infrastructure and view it through a single interface with our customizable, unified monitoring platform

Quest Software
 

Sample Customers

Lake IT; ArcelorMittal; Canadian Natural Resources; Capital One Financial; Comcast; Dollar General; Pfizer Inc.; SCANA; Tata Consultancy Services; United Technologies; Xerox; Boostability; Daycoval; Exelon Corporation; Methodist Hospitals of Dallas Inc.; A-Tex A/S; University of California, Irvine; American Career College; Region Hovedstaden; Wunderman; Johannesburg Stock Exchange; Almacenes Vidri, S.A. de C.V.; Indiana Weslyan University; Mizuho Securities; Isala Klinieken; National Metrology Institute of SA; Raja; KMD AS; Advantage Solutions; infusystem; Portafolio de Negocios S.A. de C.V. - DG; Liaison International; Novaccent; National Council of State Boards of Nursing; Applied Innovations; St. Helen & Knowsley NHS Trust; Xtra Lease LLC; Catharina Ziekenhuis; HF; Florida Housing Finance Corporation; Fiserv, Inc.; West Bend Mutual Insurance Company; CITY OF ST JOHNS; Government Employees Insurance Company; Arbella Insurance Group; Quarto Group Software Systems Inc.; City of Sioux Falls
CommitDBA
Buyer's Guide
Database Development and Management
June 2025
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