Quest Software
Quest Software delivers innovative products that help organizations get more performance and productivity from their applications, databases and Windows infrastructure. Through a deep expertise in IT operations and a continued focus on what works best, Quest helps more than 18,000 customers worldwide meet higher expectations for enterprise IT. Quest Software can be found in offices around the globe.
Toad is an intuitive Windows client tool that allows database developers and database administrators manage and develop against a variety of databases including Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, and DB2.
During Quest Software's Toad beta test period they discovered that it was consuming too much memory, and overall, running slow. Recently, Quest Software's Lee Grissom took the time out of his busy schedule to tell us how they turned to AQtime to help improve Toad's speed and performance.
Quest Software and AQtime
Having a profiler tool is essential for almost any software project. "In our particular case, we wrote Toad for SQL Server, DB2 and MySQL from scratch in C#. The expertise we had in the Win32 world didn’t easily translate into the .NET world," said Lee Grissom, from Quest Software.
"The behavior of the CLR is drastically different than what we were used to. We needed a good profiling tool to teach us empirically how to write high performance code in .NET. In particular, the new Garbage Collection and String objects challenged us during the course of development. "
"Since AQtime has a much nicer UI than any other solution, we decided to use this as our tool. And after using AQtime, we have found several memory leaks and other performance issues that have helped us improve Toad's overall performance."
"When populating result sets from SQL queries that returned a lot of columns (even if only returning a single row), we managed to reduce the time in one test case from 15 seconds down to 1 second."
Toad Beta Test
Lee said, "Customers were expressing concerns over general sluggishness and memory consumption during the Toad Beta test period. With the help of AQtime, we’ve recently been able to address most of the concerns."
Quest Software Future Use of AQtime
"Currently, we do not have a process for AQtime and we only work with AQtime when a staff member or beta tester raises a concern. In the future, I would like to incorporate Coverage profiling as part of our smoke tests," said Lee.