I wanted these tools to be first thing I reviewed, because I want everyone to know how amazing they are. I recently switch to Vista on my production machine, and I tried to prioritize the software I installed in the order of how critical it was to being able to function in my job … the top of the list went something like this:
- Office 2007
- Visual Studio 2005
- SQL Server 2005
- Red-Gate Tools
…
These tools are irreplaceable. SQL Compare alone saves save me and my team a ton of time every week. Red-Gate has great prices (most tools are $300-400), and I can’t remember ever running into a bug and have been using this stuff for over two years. Some of this software has to be pretty intelligent in regards to how it orders updates, and in the hundreds of times I have ran it I only had undesired side-effects twice. Here is what I use each tool for:
SQL Compare: Compares the schema of two databases, including tables, stored procedures, views, functions, users, and roles. It looks at the structure of the databases … not the actual data contained in them. It allows a user to see the differences between objects in an intuitive interface, choose which should be moved to the target database, and then generates a T-SQL script to make the changes. This is the most useful tool for me, because this makes it really easy to move application code and database updates from the development environment to the production environment.
SQL Data Compare: Compares the data in two databases … not the schema. Allows a user to view the individual rows that are different in each database, generates a script to update the target to match the source database. I don’t use this quite as often, because you typically have a production set of data and don’t need to move actual rows from a development environment to the production environment. But it comes in useful enough to justify the cost.
SQL Refactor: I don’t think I have realized what all this tool is capable of, but just what I am aware of makes it pretty cool. My team has to view/edit stored procedures written by another company that have extremely poor formatting to the point that they are almost impossible to read. When you install this tool, it creates a menu item inside SQL Management Studio. I have the ability to set options related to how I prefer my T-SQL code to be formatted (placement of things like columns, join clauses, subqueries and other things like wrapping, spacing, etc), and when I open one of those ugly procedures I can go in the menu to SQL Refactor > Lay Out SQL … and that’s it. You can share the same settings between a whole team, and then make sure everyone formats procedures the same. It also allows you to do things like “Expand Wildcards”, which intelligently converts a “SELECT *” to a list of qualified columns. And one more really cool thing is that it can help you rename tables, columns, parameters, and other objects, and SQL Refactor will find all of the dependencies and change them accordingly. Yes, I mean it … all dependencies (inside procedures, views, relationships, and other objects). All this and more for around $300.
Conclusion: These Red-Gate tools are a no-brainer. Compared to other development tools they are incredibly cheap, and their software quality is flawless.
http://www.red-gate.com