SMT 1.9 is ready

Greetings to SMT community, 

May 2023 is a month of corronation of Charles III and new SMT version (1.9).
Since last announced update, we released some hotfixes so officially the latest version before this bigger release was 1.8.7. This was mostly covering hotfixes of issues or improvements that were straight forward.

To keep yourself updated about what has changed please have a read of the folowing list, and if you have any questions, let us know, we would be more than happy to provide further context.

• To encourage recording tunning efforts on your servers we made it possible to create a tuning task directly of the query hash detail report.

Fig. 1: Create tuning task directly from query hash

• Another change that should help you with tuning queries is the possibility to force query hash collection from the same screen as above. This will add collect performace metrics of this query every time when the query performance collection runs regardless of how expensive the query really was.

Fig. 2: Force query performance collection for a query hash

• We optimized storing data that are initially collected per session with a focus on storage requirements.
• Making changes and its parameters, especially those which accept multiple values will be much simpler, no more delimiters, just use the provided boxes and buttons.

Fig. 3: More pleasant parameter management

• We are also adding more notifications to either inform you about events on your server or within SMT itself, e.g., new tuning task. To keep you in charge of how much information you prefer to get, there is a new option in personal settings to disable some of these announcements.

Fig. 4: Make your choices about notifications in SMT

• We made some changes that are not yet visible but will be using it internally and making it available in future releases, this is related to an automated way of checking the health of your servers, stay tuned for updates in this area.
• If you were using Performance Compare report now you find it at the same spot just called A/B Testing.
• A significant number of changes help us build reports using our SMT GenReport framework.
• We made some updates to the SQL connections of SMT so that the following will be possible.
  • The SQL account used by SMT will not have to be sysadmin anymore.
  • This will allow customers to update the password of this user at any time.
• Finally, SMT frontend application got all libraries updated to keep it secure, this requires some libraries to be replaced and extensive testing on our end.

As you can see on top of the visible changes delivered in 1.9 there are several internal updates and changes that have been done, just will be published in a short period as a minor release.

We hope you find at least some of the updates useful. Do not hesitate to reach out in case of any questions or ask our colleagues in the upcoming client meetings.

On behalf of the SMT development team.
Jiri Dolezalek