Red Gate’s SQL Prompt Enhanced
I’ve been using Red Gate products for years and I’ve turned into a bit of a cheerleader for them. I can’t help it. They have good products.
One of the tools that I’ve been using for a while (truth told since before it was owned by Red Gate) is SQL Prompt. A new version, 3.8, has recently been released. I’ve been using for a few days now. It really is an improvement over the previous version. I haven’t done system measurements or anything, but it feels faster. It’s picked up the schema’s from the systems I normally access quite well. It failed when I put it against the SCOM data mart, but so did the prior version. There are quite a few cosmetic enhancements. Some of the pop-ups look a bit more clean to my eye but I’m not sure what they’ve changed. I was looking through the options and noticed direct support for compound keys. That may not have been added to 3.8, but it’s relatively new. Most everything else is familiar. The functionality is sweet and goes well beyond what’s available in SQL Server 2008 (although, that’s pretty nice too). The startup time seems to be a bit faster.
The big new thing comes with the Pro version, Layout. It looks like they took the layout function straight out of SQL Refactor (as a side note, I loved Refactor, but this is most of what I used it for, it might fall off my machine). The options window is pretty different, so maybe this is new code. Either way, it’s great functionality. With Prompt catching most of the keywords and formatting them correctly, a lot of the time, only laying out the code is left. A quick couple of key strokes and it walks through getting everything into the right place. Having all your code formatted the same way makes it much easier to read for coding, troubleshooting and general maintenance. This ease increases your productivity, even if only a little bit.
Another cool thing I found was that you can hover over a table or a column and a menu appears. Clicking on the objects in the menu shows a definition for that table. Pretty slick stuff.
I’m sure there’s more to it (here are the release notes), but that’s what I’ve found so far. Another win from Red Gate.
Community Building
Building a community is hard. I’m one of the leaders of the Southern New England SQL Server Users Group, SNESSUG, a PASS affiliate. We’ve been going for just over a year. We were launched by the drive and initiative of one person, who got us going and then had to leave. We’ve been on our own for about four months now. It’s been difficult without the drive of the founder, but we’re getting the job done & moving things forward. Andy Leanard, MVP, Solid Quality Mentor, nice guy (for a DBA), has a series of posts that, while short, are very helpful guide-posts for those attempting to start a community or keep one running (read them bottom to top). If you’re in that position or thinking about volunteering at your local community group (and if you haven’t volunteered, do it, they need the help), this is worth a read (or two).
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