SMT 1.4.0 available

Dear SMT users and fans,

after some time we are ready to announce that another version of SMT is ready and will be made available for an automated update process in the next few days. 

This release has touched all parts of SMT including SMT application and API, SMT service and both config and collector database. Additionally, some changes have been made to the centralised part of SMT as well. 

See a list of the changes;

• Report changes
  • Overview – dashboard like report for all your instances at one screen where you can compare current workload and even compare it with previous week
  • Current activity with session kill option – this version is available only to power users, standard users will miss the button but will see all the other information related to active sessions.
  • Tempdb -> Current TempDB sessions – new report to show you currently active sessions utilising your temp db.
  • Indexes -> Index Design Changes – do you want to see what indexes changed on a specific day? You can use this report to review them for example after software updates.
  • Index detail – between legacy and SMT 1.0 we lost some of the useful tables to show sample queries and design changes on an index detail level. These two are now back.
  • Concurrency reports were redesigned a bit for a better user experience.
  • Query reporting has been extended with new data.
    • We do now collect queries based on the high plan generation numbers.
    • We show information about rows as a next IO metric.
    • You can set SMT to collect particular query hash regardless of its performance figures.
    • The way how we do collect query performance, number of queries collected each time, has been parametrised.
    • Extension of the query reporting required some changes to the design of related reports – we introduced new tabs so you can consume information easier.

• Design changes
  • We have made SMT smaller. This primarily includes default font size, which led to smaller tables and controls. This was done to get a better view of data on one screen. You can always zoom in or talk to us if you don’t like this, we may adjust configuration of your SMT instance.
  • SMT is able to display text controls on multiple lines.
  • We have updated formatting and highlighting solution for both modal windows and text input areas. Additionally, SMT is now capable of formatting and highlighting SQL text directly in table cells, which we will start using to provide better visibility.
  • SMT notification alert window has been split to alerts and events tabs and is capable of interpreting html tags.

• Functional changes
  • Enhancements of Tuning tasks:
    • Saving tuning task in progress on background to mitigate losing your work.
    • Incorporate new formatting for tuning task view.
    • Some other minor updates to make the work with this module more pleasant.
  • When you order table by a column the first direction is not in a descending order.
  • We have added new parameters, which you can use to manage SMT.
  • We have introduced new way how to manage alerting, for customers with support we will be looking at replacing emails to pushing alerts through our core server.
  • We have made further changes to modal windows shown as a request to confirm action done by user in SMT.
  • New “Copy formatted” button in modal windows. You can now use this button to get the SQL code already preformatted. We of course kept the Copy button, so you make the choice to get the code as it ran on the server or formatted using SMT formatter solution.
  • In the main date & time filter you can now use “Now” option, which should make it easy to view current data.
• Miscellaneous
  • Update to list of wait types to be collected. We do not collect some of the system wait types which are harmless and were only overwhelming charts with high wait figures, which did not mean anything.
  • In query statement details we noticed that extremely long batch can overload the frontend running in your browser and cause slow response of this view. Therefore, we limit the length of the batch shown on this screen to 50k characters, but we have added a download button so you can always get the full batch without any changes to it done by SMT.
  • Frontend error handling improvements.
  • Resolve possible issues with refreshing authentication token.
  • Performance tuning of SMT based on regular evaluation.
  • There was a group of tasks that covers bug fixes, enhancements, and product maintenance. Most of those were made to make the product more stable going forward and were not causing any issues seen by users.

Get in touch in case you have any questions we would be happy to have a chat with you.

Regards,
Jiri D.