By: Rob Verschoor

The MDA tables (introduced in ASE 12.5.0.3) provide a new way of looking at ASE. These monitoring tables provide a lot of low-level data about what's happening inside ASE. The challenge is how to turn this data into information that is meaningful for a DBA. This presentation will examine how the MDA tables can be used to address some common issues faced by many DBAs. This includes topics such as ASE performance monitoring and troubleshooting, debugging application behaviour as well as some handy tools for the DBA. There is also a look at programming issues when querying the MDA tables which, due to their special nature, there are some gotchas that can be avoided.