We performed a comparison between Quest Foglight for Databases and Toad for Oracle based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Database Development and Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Foglight is also able to help the DBAs proactively fix problems before they become an issue. It provides them with real-time activity screens that help in this regard. The DBAs are able to go to these screens and look at what's happening in real time, and that buys them time. It helps them see problems ahead of time and find solutions to them."
"The PI module allows [my colleague] to identify which new indexes or modified indexes are going to make the biggest impact."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"One of the hardest things to do in database management is to evaluate performance deviation across time. The adaptive baseline that Quest is using is by far the most helpful. That doesn't necessarily mean I use it on a daily basis, but it is something that I have not been able to find in any other tool, at the same level."
"Its reporting capabilities are immense."
"It is very easy to manage all of the objects."
"The schema browser is the most valuable feature. The way it presents the objects in our database."
"I haven't seen any issues with scalability. We have about 1000 people on our IT team who use the solution."
"Oracle has advanced query optimization and tuning features that help improve the performance of SQL queries."
"Toad for Oracle has proven to be better than other tools since we have never experienced any crashes."
"I find Toad easy to use and I love the Workspace feature, which allows me to set up projects so that I can open SQL files applicable to what I am working on at any particular time."
"Toad has a lot of features that are very useful, fast, and well developed."
"A quite simple feature that I have not encountered elsewhere is the "Make Code" feature. I can easily export a complex SQL statement to a programming language. This is a great timesaver as I do not have to type in all of the escape/concatenation characters just to create a SQL statement in C# or C++."
"The version that I'm using is not the latest version, so there might have been some improvement, but the OS monitoring is a bit lacking, and the high-availability option is a bit complicated to set up and it doesn't work all the time."
"I get a lot of alerts that, while important, are not critical. Then I have to dig in and figure out how to turn alerts off, but not the logging. I want to be able to go back, once we get the other big issues out of the way, and start fine-tuning some of those other areas, but I don't necessarily want to receive an email for all of them."
"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."
"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."
"One thing that I would like, and it's probably something that I could set up internally, is something other than a dashboard which I have to look at to know that a server is down. I'd like bells and whistles to go off... If I look at the dashboard I know there's a server down. But if I'm not looking at it, if I'm looking at some other problem, I want to know about it. You can do that, you can use SMSs and alerts to your phone, and I could set it up to handle that, but it would be nice if, out-of-the-box, Foglight did that."
"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."
"The system is not that stable. We have been facing a lot of issues. We built a new store environment of Foglight, an environment for monitoring the Lowe's store servers, which are all Db2 servers. The objective is to monitor 800 Db2 servers in each Foglight instance. Up to 150 Db2 servers, the environment was working fine. The moment it crossed 150 or 160, we started having a lot of stability issues."
"Toad for Oracle could improve code completion, it is very slow."
"Query optimization is still very resource-intensive."
"The way the dialog boxes appear can be improved."
"In future releases, the product can be more intuitive. It has to be lighter than what it is because sometimes it is not responding quickly. If I do some features at the same time, it's not supporting. I have to wait sometimes to get the action. It's dependent on the resources of the workstation, but it has to be improved in this area. The faster processing is needed."
"Once in a while, I may encounter a memory exception and have to abort the application. On a few occasions, the file that stores the saved connections for the New Connection window will become corrupt and I will lose all of my saved connections. I am not sure if that is a Windows or TOAD issue, but it has happened to all of my developers at some point or another."
"Sometimes it works in some areas, but in others, it doesn't. Like when you copy, you find that it's blank and doesn't copy anything. So, there are some objects that do copy, and sometimes they don't."
"I'd like reporting to be more available. If it was a feature that was already installed, more people would take advantage of it."
"Toad for Oracle does not have a particular resolution within the application."
Quest Foglight for Databases is ranked 2nd in Database Development and Management with 10 reviews while Toad for Oracle is ranked 3rd in Database Development and Management with 15 reviews. Quest Foglight for Databases is rated 8.6, while Toad for Oracle is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Quest Foglight for Databases writes "Excels at displaying intensive database queries and enables me to address things before they become real problems". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Toad for Oracle writes "Advanced query optimization and tuning features ". Quest Foglight for Databases is most compared with Quest Spotlight, Oracle Enterprise Manager, SolarWinds Database Performance Analyzer, IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL Server and SQL Sentry, whereas Toad for Oracle is most compared with Toad Edge, Oracle Enterprise Manager, Aqua Data Studio, DbVisualizer and Toad Data Modeler. See our Quest Foglight for Databases vs. Toad for Oracle report.
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