I first reviewed Lumigent's Log Explorer shortly after release of version 1.0.  In that review I stated that it was one of 2 products on the market for DBAs that were a must have for your environment.  That was because Log Explorer gave you the capability to read your transaction logs which can be necessary at times and that functionality was not available elsewhere. 

However, version 1.0 was missing a lot of features and usability in an environment was an issue.  You could get the job done eventually, but it took a long time and wasn't very easy.  Version 2.0 removes all of these problems.  Not only does Log Explorer perform a necessary function, unavailable in any other product including SQL Server itself, but it does so very easy and very flexibly.  I am extremely pleased in seeing the very rapid maturation of the user interface and feature set in Log Explorer.  A very big thank you to Lumigent Technologies for quickly fixing many of the interface flaws and rapidly rolling out several updates to Log Explorer.

Version 2.0 is the second major release of Log Explorer.  It should be interesting to see what the folks at Lumigent have in store for the next version, because I consider version 2.0 feature complete and functionality complete.  It is very rare that you see a company produce a complete product in just 2 versions.  I haven't encountered any features or functionality that is missing from Log Explorer.

The premise of Log Explorer is actually rather simple.  Your database is composed of committed data and a transaction log.  The transaction log contains a history of every transaction that was issued against your database.  With the exception of certain bulk loading operations, the contents of your transaction log represents all of the data that was written to your database.  If you haven't processed any minimally logged transactions that will not appear in the transaction log and you have all transaction logs since the database was created, you can "replay" the transaction logs in sequence and recreate the data in your database to any point in time.  The ability to "replay" a transaction log can be accomplished using a restore to a point in time.

However, you have no ability to ever know what any of those transaction logs contains until after the restore process completes.  Unlike other high end DBMSes like DB2 or Oracle, SQL Server gives you no interface to look into the transaction log.  There are also times when a user may have inadvertently modified data and they want to revert back to the previous state.  Without Log Explorer, you can do this with a restore, but this takes the entire database back to the previous point.  This loses any other transactions that have occurred which is not usually what you are after.  This process also takes the entire database offline during the restore.  Log Explorer gives you the ability to not only look into the transaction log, but also to generate a script that will essentially "undo" a particular transaction.  This gives you the ability to leave the database online and operational, preserve all other changes that have happened in the database, and also revert that particular piece of data that was changed.

Most database outages happen because of user errors in the data and not system problems.  With Log Explorer, you can eliminate the outages you used to take due to user errors and simply fix the data while the database is still online and operational.

Log Explorer consists of two components.  The client application can be installed on as many desktops as you want and contains the user interface to interact with your transaction logs.  The other component is an extended stored procedure that is installed on your database server.  Log Explorer is licensed by each server you install the extended stored procedure to.

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