User profile for Dan J Archer

Hey Glyn, Under the circumstances, if you send me a private message I'll see about getting your trial extended if you'd like to continue evaluating the product. Regards, Dan / comments

Hey Glyn, Under the circumstances, if you send me a private message I'll see about getting your trial extended if you'd like to continue evaluating the product. Regards, Dan

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Hi Steve, Thanks for the feedback. Yep, that's a small bugette in the 2.0 release. It's fixed for our forthcoming 2.1 maintainance release, which'll be free to existing customers. We did consider making the panel dockable. I'll pass your comment on to the team. In the meantime, you can still leave the script window open whilst you click around - admittedly this is easier on a high resolution or multi monitor system. Thanks again, Dan / comments

Hi Steve, Thanks for the feedback. Yep, that's a small bugette in the 2.0 release. It's fixed for our forthcoming 2.1 maintainance release, which'll be free to existing customers. We did consider m...

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Hi Eric, You're most welcome, glad to be of service. Apologies for the slight labour involved here - with a fixed time budget for development we did agonise over which features were vital and which less so. Generally we opted for providing functionality which wasn't available through other means; this does mean that a few tasks like this are a bit more involved. Thanks for persevering! Cheers, Dan / comments

Hi Eric, You're most welcome, glad to be of service. Apologies for the slight labour involved here - with a fixed time budget for development we did agonise over which features were vital and whic...

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Hi Eric, Thanks for the feedback. There wasn't time in the development schedule for v2.0 to include the features you're talking about, but there are a few ways to achieve these goals: You can copy either the whole diagram, the current selection or the currently visible area onto the clipboard: select Copy from the toolbar or from the Edit menu. You can then Paste this into a graphics-compatible application with print capabilities. During the beta, it was recommended by one of our users that Excel is an excellent choice for this task, since it handles printing of such large areas very well. To chose the print area, you could arrange the display so that the visible area contains only that which you wish to print, just by panning and zooming around the diagram, and temporarily hiding any objects you wish to omit. After pasting into an application such as Excel you can resize the image to the size you want - since it's a vector based image it should scale well in applications which support the vector format we export (EMF or enhanced metafile format). To export to PDF, repeat the same process but chose as your destination an application which directly supports PDF export. There are a number of them out there (such as popular third party office applications). Alternatively, export the diagram as EMF and use a third party EMF to PDF converter; again there are a number of them available over the net. Apologies for the fact that this feature isn't in Dependency Tracker. It will be considered as and when we're planning the next major release. / comments

Hi Eric, Thanks for the feedback. There wasn't time in the development schedule for v2.0 to include the features you're talking about, but there are a few ways to achieve these goals: You can copy ...

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Hi tsoren, Thanks for the feedback. 1. To achieve this you can select an object, pull down the Edit menu (or right click the object) and choose Select, then Same Type. This will select all objects of that type. Then right click, select Properties, and change the colour. All selected objects will change colour. (There is an issue in the 2.0 release if your selection is very large; this is fixed in our 2.1 release, which is upcoming will be free to existing customers.) 2. Duly noted. The best you can do is to right click, select View SQL Script, and inspect the script visually for the reference. This gives you more detail than an indicator as to the type of dependency - of course it may be too much detail for you. All the best, Dan / comments

Hi tsoren, Thanks for the feedback. 1. To achieve this you can select an object, pull down the Edit menu (or right click the object) and choose Select, then Same Type. This will select all objects ...

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Thanks Fernando, That's a very good workaround. If this works, I'd recommend others with this issue follow your lead for the moment. The warning you're seeing is a standard one; Dependency Tracker flags any unresolved reference, whether it ultimately can be resolved by right clicking and Resolving External References or not. All the best, Dan / comments

Thanks Fernando, That's a very good workaround. If this works, I'd recommend others with this issue follow your lead for the moment. The warning you're seeing is a standard one; Dependency Tracker ...

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Thanks for the report. We're looking into this - it looks like our parser doesn't fully support linked servers. It tries to translate that four part name such that LinkServer is a literal SQL Server instance name. I'll pass this on to the appropriate development team. We may be able to add this support for a future release, provided that the server on the other end of the link is a SQL Server 2000 or 2005 instance. Meantime, you should still be able to use a literal server name, assuming that server is a SQL Server 2000 or 2005 instance. Thanks, Dan / comments

Thanks for the report. We're looking into this - it looks like our parser doesn't fully support linked servers. It tries to translate that four part name such that LinkServer is a literal SQL Serve...

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Hi, 1. You can click an object of a certain type, then right click it and choose Select->Same Type from the menu. This selects across all databases on the diagram. Then right click and hit Properties on the menu. If you change the Fill Color and Text Color, those changes will be applied to the entire selection; ie. to all objects of that type. There is a bug in the 2.0 release whereby getting Properties on a large selection fails. This will be fixed in our forthcoming 2.1 release, which will be a 100% free upgrade from 2.0. 2. Thanks for that one - I'll pass it straight on. Cheers, Dan / comments

Hi, 1. You can click an object of a certain type, then right click it and choose Select->Same Type from the menu. This selects across all databases on the diagram. Then right click and hit Properti...

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Hi there, I can tell you that the price is likely to remain the same for the forseeable future. As far as the future goes, we don't have firm plans at the moment: we're still waiting to get more feedback on the current version. We think we've produced an application that people can really get some good use out of. I can tell you there'll likely be a patch release in the next few weeks or months, but this is mainly a placeholder for any critical bug fixes that prove necessary, and a few tweaks. In terms of appearance and functionality there won't be much of a difference, if any. We'll also have some help online soon. In the longer term, we're assessing the feedback we've got since the release of the free 1.0 beta version last year. Initially, analysing the feedback suggested one primary goal, which was the basis of the direction taken by our 2.0: to provide a way of analysing the impact of changes before they occur. And to provide easy ways of getting a diagram of those impacted objects into other applications. Exploring the database schema was a slightly secondary goal, but is still a valid and valuable one. However, as the beta for 2.0 became increasingly public, we got some even more useful feedback from users dealing with very large databases. Such schemas are so complex that a full diagram isn't really much help in terms of analysing dependencies. There's too much information. Now we did design Dependency Tracker to cope with this: you add a small subset of objects to the diagram, and the application will find the dependencies for you. So you can work bottom up. Of course some of our users want to browse and explore the dependencies in very large databases, working top down. So we're considering that avenue. Perhaps a more explorer like, potentially more text based interface for tracking dependencies. There could also be support for scripting/automation via an external API; and support for a command line so dependency tracking can be run as part of people's batch processes. We'd likely provide printing and more export options, perhaps to save the dependencies into a database so that DBAs and developers can inspect them with good old SQL. This approach could be rather different, with a rather different user interface. The diagram might not be as central to the application as it is now. This variant on Dependency Tracker, if it were to come to pass, could be a Professional version for our more hard core users. So I can't promise anything, but these are some of our thoughts on future directions. Hope that's of help, All the best, Dan Dan J Archer SQL Dependency Tracker Project Lead Red Gate Software / comments

Hi there, I can tell you that the price is likely to remain the same for the forseeable future. As far as the future goes, we don't have firm plans at the moment: we're still waiting to get more fe...

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Just a note to say that we've now released v2.1. See the announcement thread with that name for more details. We also have some great online help in the pipeline, which will be online within the next few weeks. Dan / comments

Just a note to say that we've now released v2.1. See the announcement thread with that name for more details. We also have some great online help in the pipeline, which will be online within the ne...

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Dan J Archer

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