Does SAT have any advantages over ST12?

Question

I use ST12 in my daily work, but could I benefit from learning SAT too?

Does it provide anything useful, that cannot be found in ST12?

Answer 1

In general, as a developer you want to understand all the tools that are available to you. Then you will be able to determine yourself when the most appropriate time is to use either tool.

It is true that you could probably do 95% of your analysis just using ST12. I find SAT useful when your bottleneck might not be the database, or when you just want an overview of a program that you may not have written yourself. At some clients SAT was also the only tool that I had authorization for and you had to ask Basis to run ST12 on your behalf.

I find SAT my first point of call for performance analysis, as it generally gives me a better idea of what to focus on in the more detailed ST12 trace. In SAT there is not "Display Execute plan" button, so if you want to know exactly what your code is doing on the database you'll need ST12 for it.

Answer 2

SAT can show memory usage, for everything else ST12 is better

ST12 has many advantages:

• it shows the program flow better, with "Bottom up call hierarchy"
• it shows the children of a module better with "Top-down call tree"
• it provides better details of SQL statements
• it even links the STAD records

SAT has one advantage:

• it can show you where the memory usage has huge jumps