Instead of working, I blog.

Like me mentioned in my IW blog last week, I got a hold of Red-Gate’s new data generator and started playing around with it. The first thing I noticed was that it didn’t yet support Katmai. I’m a little confused by that because the libraries should be close enough to be able to make a basic connection so there shouldn’t be anything wrong with it, but alas, it’s unsupported as of yet. I did connect with the PM on the project who showed me their roadmap which tells me that it should have Katmai support by Q3. No worries, I just put up a Yukon instance so I’ll be starting up my testing soon. Now, I realize that they wanted to make it a simple tool that only connects to SQL Server, so they don’t support ODBC. But that’s the definite advantage to supporting ODBC is that as long as you adhere to basic ANSI you should be able to connect to any DB you have loaded. So in this case, they could support SQL Server only as well as accepting ODBC and you could easily connect to a beta copy like Katmai. Still, I get where they’re coming from; I just always want it all.
Now about the roadmap… I saw some interesting things in there.

1. In Q2 SQ Prompt 3.8 will be released offering a Pro version that incorporates the layout SQL functionality from Refactor. I’ve been trying to find out more info on the future of Refactor, but I’m having trouble hooking up with the PM. I’ll let you know more when I manage to hook up. I don’t know when exactly in Q2, but if they shoot me a press release I’ll let you know and maybe I’ll even get some code to play with as well.

2. Also in Q2 will be SQL Response. This is their new monitoring product. I had no idea that the market could still support a monitoring product, but it apparently can. Personally, I’m really big in the monitoring space so I can’t wait to see what they come up with.

3. Exception Hunter was release back in Dec and I didn’t even know about that one. It sounds interesting though so I’m going to do some reading on it and see what I come up with.
OK, that’s it, but take a look at the roadmap and keep an eye on it for more tidbits. It would be nice if they’d wrap an RSS around it so I don’t have to keep checking.