Okay - I've been reading through a ton of blogs, and every other one
seems to have some neat, new-to-me tool that I've missed that I could
really use. Our production DBA recently left, and I'd rather find
code to help me do his job, improve things, and maybe get some
sleep.

For instance, I hadn't seen these until recently:
Performance Dashboard - SSMS reports with everything from CPU usage to
top queries, etc.
SQL DMVStats - code that builds and populates a repository of
performance data using DMVs
SQL Server Hosting Toolkit - potentially a way to better deploy code
to QA & Production.

What other projects have I missed? Our environment has Clusters,
VLDBs, a QA environment, etc, etc ... and after finding these I'm sure
that other, brighter, minds have come up with stuff to make my life
easier.

Thanks in advance.

Try here:
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/colu...dbird/2959.asp


--
TheSQLGuru
President
Indicium Resources, Inc.

<bourgon (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote

On Jul 11, 3:37 pm, bour... (AT) gmail (DOT) com wrote:
I know you are looking for free, but it looks like the other response
covers that in pretty good detail. If you want to buy some tools that
are easy on the company's pocketbook, I'd suggest taking a look at
RedGate's software package. Quest/Litespeed are defacto leader's I'd
say, however RedGate's array of tools are wonderful, as are the
prices.

http://www.red-gate.com

You'll find tools to make your life quite a bit better. If you have
an MSDN license at work, take a look at Visual Studio Team Systems for
Database Professionals (out of breath after typing that one). You'll
find quite a bit of tools (schema compares, data compares, unit
testing, deployment methods, data generations, etc). It is a great
tool to help you with the deployment mechanisms.

Again I know you asked for free, so sorry to derail that part of it.

Aaron

On Jul 11, 9:53 pm, acorcoran <acorco... (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote:

Yup. Using a couple products from Quest and a couple from Red Gate,
SQL Sentry, plus a couple others.

I'll have to give a look at it. We do and I've seen it, I just saw
the sheer number of windows when it opened and my eyes glazed over.
But I'll take a look. Thanks!

See: http://www.sqlexplorer.org/index.php

This is a nice little open source tool. You can run queries against
tables/views. You can see properties of the database/table/indexes, etc.
Downsides may include: requires .NET framework, Java runtime. You can create
connection thru ODBC objects, or you can download and install Microsoft JDBC
client driver software. Does not perform some advanced administration tasks you
may be looking for.

Might look at the Idera stuff too (commercial): http://www.idera.com