DTS resource usage

Bart Read

Dear Eric,


Many thanks for your feedback on DTS Compare (although I know it was a while ago now). We're in the early stages of developing a new version of the product in which we intend to fix the memory usage issues and improve performance, although on the latter front you should be aware that because of the complexities of DTS packages comparison is unlikely to be lightning quick. We do however have some ideas that will enable you to get usable results for the packages you're interested in more quickly.


Many thanks,

======================
Bart Read
Software Engineer
Red Gate Software Ltd
======================

dgorman@sundog.net

Bart you stated:

We do however have some ideas that will enable you to get usable results for the packages you're interested in more quickly.

Can you share what these are? I'm having the same problems as everyone else, I have 30 or so DTS packages and some are huge. When I fire up DTS Compare it starts up then just seems to hang.

Bart Read

Hi,


Thanks for your feedback. First off, let me be clear that everything I say in this message is at this point speculation because we haven't even finished putting the development team together yet. Within the next few weeks I will be joined by another developer, along with a member of our QA team. Once that has happened we'll need to sit down and thrash out exactly what we're going to do for the new version, and then get approval from management. In the meantime we're gathering usage scenarios and user feedback to help us to decide where we need to take the product.

Right, with the disclaimer out of the way I'll attempt to answer your question. There are certainly at least two mechanisms, and possibly more, that we can employ to make your life easier as a user.

The first is to provide some mechanism by which you can choose the packages you're interested in for comparison. At this point DTS Compare just compares everything on the servers you select; this is obviously a real hassle if you've got 100 packages but are only interested in the 5 or 6 that relate to whatever you're working on at the moment. So what you probably want is some way to select the packages you're interested in for detailed comparison and just ignore the rest. This in itself will get you the relevant results much more quickly.

The second is to load and compare the DTS packages in the background after you've selected them and add them to the grid / tree view as they become available. That way you can look at the results for packages for which the comparison has been completed whilst the others are still being loaded and compared.

Now as I said, at this point this is all speculation on my part, however I think something along these lines could well be what we do.

In addition I'm currently looking at improving the way in which we load and compare packages. At this point I don't have any hard numbers which is what I really want, so I'm prototyping a new mechanism for doing the loading and comparison with the aim of benchmarking it against the old mechanism. Hopefully at the end of this we'll have something that would perform above and beyond the level of the existing application even if we made no other changes.

I hope this goes some way towards answering your question, and I apologise that at this stage I can't be more concrete in my response.


Kind regards,

======================
Bart Read
Software Engineer
Red Gate Software Ltd
======================

Jane_J

I can't use DTS compare at all with my DTS packages. It goes away for 30 minutes and then runs out of memory!!
Jane

Daniel Handley

Hi Jane

This is a common problem and, as Bart has mentioned in the earlier post, we are working on a new version to resolve some of these issues. I hope to be able to post an update on the progress of the team as and when i have further information.

Regards
Dan