4. State of the art
Just a few software vendor companies [6] today share
the database tool market. These tools are not ideal for the
following reasons:
• Database tool vendors intimately tie their
management tools to a single database vendor, and in
some cases, do not support all features present in the
latest releases and versions. When a database vendor
releases a new database version, database tool vendors
generally do not support this version until several months
to a year later.
• Management tools do not always provide adequate
support for all of the versions/releases for a single
database vendor, since successive releases of a database
handler may have different optimization rules, for
example. In effect, these management tools can only
partially reflect the specific expertise required to properly
administer and manage databases.
• Database tool vendors only support popular
commercial databases. No database management tool
support by software vendors is provided to the Open
Source database software community.
At this time, tool vendors generally provide
commercially available tools exclusively targeted to
individual database vendors.