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This also demonstrates one of the biggest
arguments for justifying the purchase of tools such as RapidSQL. The makers of these
tools have spent many years developing SQL and managing databases in a variety of
production environments. The whole thrust of these tools is not to simply replace
the standard set of tools like isql/w, it is to provide a superior, easy to use, point and
click development interface for SQL and database development. These tools not only
put a lot of power at your fingers tips, but they are optimized to support the way most
people work. SQL and database development can be extremely costly, especially when
it comes to building highly complex databases and SQL. Because of these costs, it is
very easy to justify the purchase of any one of these tools. In small piece on one
project that involved four very large, very complex stored procedures, RapidSQL gave us a
demonstrated time savings of over 270 hours. This project was being done in
Sybase. The first procedure in this group, which was the smallest and least complex,
was too large to fit in the buffer of wisql. I was forced to work in command line
isql with vi when developing this proc. Almost two weeks later I was still working
on it, when I stumbled across Embarcadero. We brought in RapidSQL for an eval.
That first proc and the other three which were much larger and more complex than the first
one were completed and deployed in less than 3 days. When you look at it 270 hours *
$100 per hour... I'll let you do the math and see if the price is justified.
That was over two years ago and it has been saving time like that everywhere I go. I
honestly wouldn't be caught dead without a tool like RapidSQL or even its competitor
SQL-Programmer. Enough of the sermon, on to the rest of the review! There are a few other features worth taking a look at. You have four menu items that can save quite a bit of time: upper case, lower case, comment out, and uncomment. You simply highlight the text you want to apply this to and select one of these options. This allows you to quickly upper case or lower case any text. You can also quickly comment out a block of code simply by highlighting it and selecting the comment option. The uncomment works the other way. This is much easier than having to retype text in the case you want it in and is also much better than individually commenting out blocks of code. RapidSQL includes a bookmark capability that makes it very easy to navigate large scripts. The old standby search and replace with all of the common functionality we are now used to is present as well. That wonderful search capability in DBArtisan has now been added to 4.1. If you've never seen this, I'd encourage you to download an eval copy just to experience this. This simple dialog gives you the ability to search for a particular string across any server that is currently registered with RapidSQL. Just think, you are sitting in your company that is running MS SQL Server, Sybase, and Oracle databases and you have been asked by the CEO to find a particular piece of information. You have an idea of what the object is called, but have no idea where to find it. Simply fire up the database search utility, input the string you are looking for, select your MS SQL Server, Sybase, and Oracle servers and the databases on them and hit okay.. RapidSQL will churn away and then present you with a nice list of all of the objects that matched your search criteria. The text you are searching for is even color coded so you can find it quickly. I actually use this rather extensively to find things in my environments, since I'm not as familiar with what is around. This has also saved enough time just by itself to justify the purchase of RapidSQL. As a case in point at one of my clients, it was discovered that over the course of development, the developer's had violated SQL syntax concerning nulls that was causing problems. They had used = null and <> null instead of the accepted is (not) null. Sure we could have searched for these by opening each object. But, do you really want to open up and scan over 1500 objects? In came the database search. We located and corrected all occurrences of these, over 400 of them, in less than 1 hour. Just opening the objects would have taken more time than that.
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All content on this site, except where noted, represents an original work of Michael R. Hotek and is protected by applicable copyright laws. The SQL Server FAQ is the sole work of Neil Pike. No page, portion of a page, or download may be used for commercial purposes in whole or in part without the express, written permission of the applicable author.
