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SQL-Programmer IX SP2 with TSQL Debugger 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 It's not all of the time that the big, blatant features make a product worth the cost. Of course they are the features everyone notices and the ones that usually lead to the purchasing decision. Query Analyzer has color coded syntax. It also has some of the features that are mentioned above. You can write SQL and execute it. It's bundled for free with SQL Server. For some reason that I can't understand, the majority of the MS SQL Server community refuses to purchase 3rd party tools. They keep saying that the stuff Microsoft packages does the job and it doesn't cost them anything. The tools that Microsoft packages are put together to do a job. Period. All of the extra niceties are not present. As far as the tools that Microsoft packages not costing you anything, that is very far from the truth. They cost you every time you use them in wasted time. That wasted time adds up to dollars to a company. I get asked very frequently how I got to where I am so quickly. After all, it was just a little over 5 short years ago that I first picked up Microsoft SQL Server. I got to where I am by not wasting my time doing unnecessary things. People wonder how I can possibly walk into a company and usually produce more than any 2 or 3 of the other developers/DBAs. While they are wasting their time looking up and typing column lists in stored procedures, triggers, etc., I've already dragged/dropped them in, finished up what I needed and am 3 steps down the road. I do this by not being afraid to spend a little bit of money to gain a feature that cuts time off my development cycle. Someone would call me crazy if I told you the drag/drop capability in a tiny little feature like a Personal Working Folder is worth the entire price of SQL-Programmer. You do the math. My normal end billing rate when I'm doing development is somewhere between $100/hr and $150/hr. If I have to spend 5 minutes getting a column list and typing it in every time, 12 stored procedures/triggers/batches = $100 - $150. Repeat that 10 times and I have just paid for SQL-Programmer with all of the rest of the bells and whistles it gives me. 120 stored procedures/triggers/batches is peanuts in today's databases. Suppose I got smart and created myself a stored procedure that would return a column list, separated by commas, when I input a table name. (I'm sure many of you have these.) That makes me more efficient and might cut the time after copying and pasting to 2 minutes. That means 30 stored procedures/triggers/batches = $100 - $150. That means I have just paid for SQL-Programmer by producing 300 stored procedures/triggers/batches. That's a small number of objects.Spend the time seriously evaluating the tools out there. Any tool under $3000 is very easy to justify in terms of the amount of time saved in a year. Every minute you can shave off by allowing a tool to do unnecessary work is one more minute doing what you get paid for. No one gets paid for typing column lists and such. They get paid for figuring out how to produce a specific result. Cut the time you have to do unnecessary work and you can spend more time doing the interesting things like solving problems and learning new things. That saved time also directly impacts your bottom line. The more time you save, the more you can produce in a given time period. The more you can produce, the more valuable you are. The more valuable you are, the more you get paid. SQL-Programmer is a definite plus for your development toolkit that will pay for itself many times over each year. SQL-Programmer is produced by Sylvain Faust International and has several bundling options. As of the writing of this review, a single user copy for the base product (no scripting, reporting, or debugging) was a mere $299. Adding in one of those modules moves you up to $799. The full version (Expert Edition) that includes all modules that I've reviewed here comes in at a very affordable $1299. These prices are for a single user copy. With the capabilities the 3 optional modules give you and the tiny difference in price for the large increase in functionality, I wouldn't recommend anything less than the Expert Edition. You can take a quick tour here.
SQL-Programmer IX SP2 with TSQL Debugger 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 |
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