How do you make the most of a Redgate free trial?

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  Oh, let me count the ways....
  
  I've used Toolbelt at every DBA role I've had, and occasionally I've had to try and justify the cost to those that pay the bills - out of their own pocket, it would appear - judging by the resistance I come across.
  
  At one role I argued, whined and threatened for about 15 months - showing how Prompt not only improved the presentation, readability and speed of code development but how it would also warn you if you missed the all important 'where' clause.
  Then one day another DBA had to run an important update against live data that was causing an issue - specific rows only. And - you guessed it, missed the 'where' clause off and wrecked the entire table. Brought the system down for several hours and took several days to recover the data. 
  Within a week - we all had toolbelt.
  
  We deal with vary large tables here, of very sensitive data (6 billion rows in one table and counting). So, testing something with consistent test data across several tables and enough volume to get meaningful results makes Data Generator a gift from the heavens. I don't need to keep the data lying around for another day - just save the project and regenerate it at whim.
  
  I'm just getting to grips with Source Control and that is a bit more fun than should be legal. This is because the Git projects, which have festered for years pretty much untouched. aren't as tidy as they should be. Redgate's first-class support people even dialled into a conference call, shared my screen and provided invaluable assistance in realising what the problem was.
  You also buy the support when you buy the product - something not everybody considers.
  
  SQL Monitor is invaluable. Other similar products do exist and they do have features that I wished Monitor had. But there again, Monitor has features that the others don't.
  Every morning I just need to scan the folder that emails from Monitor are sent into and my basic checks are done. The reports it generates are very useful and the trend analysis for file sizes and suchlike are very handy for forecasting storage requirements. 
  When there are performance issues it is very good for checking the workload at a small enough time-slices to work out the issues.
  So much faster than trawling through each server and doing the donkey-work myself. We do have a load of queries that store performance details at regular intervals - all home-brewed. But with Monitor I've had to use that information less and less.
  
  SQL Dependency Tracker shows the spider's web that is our system in a way that pleases and terrifies me at the same time. I really don't know how this system evolved this way. Pentagrams, black candles and a couple of dead goats is my guess. It does make investigating the impact of changes to one (apparently) small area easier to predict.
  
  SQL Doc is a much-ignored tool and yet so useful. At one role I designed a database from scratch. Now, provided those that followed in my wake continued the good work, every procedure, table, column has a short description against it. There isn't one such entry here and each night I stab effigies of those that were here before me.
  It saves so much investigative work when that type of metadata is already in the database. On the assumption it is correct, of course.
  
  SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare are wonderful for moving changes from one environment to the next, without making the assumption that somebody writing the code knows what they are doing. They are also good at investigating why something in one environment works fine and yet in another just doesn't. Not that that happens very often, of course...
  
  SQL Multi-script I've only used a handful of times and long ago. It was useful as it saved having to move environments to run a script multiple times. It made it harder to miss a server out, although not impossible. No stupidity can be avoided if you try hard enough.
  
  SQL Test is very good at running a simple set of tests reliably and consistently. At my previous role I did have issues when trying some more involved tests with it and haven' had the opportunity to revisit it.
  
  DML Dashboard is a nice, simple and free way to watch out for anybody changing a schema without your knowledge. Not that such a thing happens when a large number of developers and a small number of DBAs get together on a variety of projects. Never happens...
  
  My only gripe is Backup Pro. It is actually a nice tool that can be used quite easily, but there are some things about it that I don't like- just not enough to whine about it. I'm perfectly happy with Ola's backup scripts. I'm very comfortable with the backup/restore process so don't want that level of GUI to get between myself and what I want. But for those organisations that don't have that level of confidence (I won't say expertise, I just know that something horrible will happen with backups in the next 48 hours, if I do) then it is a useful tool.

  
  

  Put my name in a post if you wish - I'm too old to be scared by such things now.

  BrainDonor August 20, 2020 15:43

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  Thanks, BrainDonor - really appreciate your comments. There's some great stuff there.

  MattHilbert August 20, 2020 15:57

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