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dbForge Data Studio for SQL Server
While reading my email I came across an announcement from devart located at www.devart.com. They announced the release of their new dbForge data studio.
"Devart today delivered the first version of dbForge Data Studio for SQL Server, a comprehensive solution for data analysts and application developers to efficiently explore, analyze, and report on huge amounts of data in SQL Server databases. Being a newcomer in dbForge for SQL Server product line, dbForge Data Studio is based on tried-and-true tools, approved by many users, and guarantees new users superior data processing experiences and flawless results within a stable world class solution."
They have a 30 day trial evaluation version I quickly downloaded, and got to work. It installed very fast, and contains a surprising amount of functionality for such a small package. I simply installed, started up the program, connected to one of my servers and was immediately able to start mining data on my server.
Being honest with you, I only played with it for 10 minutes. In that short amount of time I was able to:
- open a couple tables and review contents
- create a master/child query which retrieves all records from a master table and looks up all child records in a child table; you assign the relationship
- create a custom report on one of my change log tables. Nice layout with familiar controls
- create a custom query in the SQL text tool
- execute a data compare between my production and backup server on specified tables
Again I was surprised by the performance. I’m running my tests on a 32 bit machine over a DSL connection to my database. Still the product performed incredibly fast…especially in the database compare.
It’s not everything you want or need. But for the price, I was rather impressed with the performance. It would be a nice data mining tool to have around as a DBA.
There were a lot of other capabilities that I didn’t have time to touch. I’ll see if I can get some time for a complete review in an article later. I’d encourage you to go take a look at their offerings.
I did also download and install their Add In for SQL Server Management Studio called SQL Complete. It preforms the same role as the Intellisense built into management studio. However, it works with any version of SQL Server from SQL 2000 and later. This means that even when you upgrade from one version of SSMS to another, it is still Intellisense backward compatible. They have a free version you can download and take for a test run.
Maybe this is a little treat for the holidays?
If you have any tool tips to share with the rest of our readers, be sure to drop me a note at btaylor@sswug.org.
Cheers,
Ben