Red-Gate SQL Tools
Some time ago I was given a licence for the first version of Red-Gate's SQL Prompt tool which provides Intellisense on SQL Server databases whilst using SQL Management Studio or Visual Studio. I was impressed with the tool as the intellisense support it gave was excellent but I didn't make a great deal of use of it because it had one large drawback - it was sloooooowww. On my development box I'd finished typing the Sql before SQL Prompt had brought up it's Intellisense.
Recently I've been evaluating Red-Gate's SQL Prompt bundle, which contains SQL Prompt, SQL Doc and SQL Refactor. I was keen to see how SQL Prompt had improved in its latest incarnation (version 3) and I have to say I am really, really impressed. The whole tool has been re-engineered and it is now many orders of magnitude quicker. In fact it is lighting fast and much quicker than the VS Intellisense in Visual Studio. The intellisense is also really useful and makes writing correct SQL queries simplicity itself. I can't praise this tool highly enough, it's brilliant! This kind of tool should really have shipped with the SQL Management Studio. If the folks at Microsoft have got any sense they should make Red-Gate an offer for this tool and distribute it as part of the SQL Server product offering.
I'm also really impressed with SQL Doc, a straightforward tool for documenting SQL Server databases. This is a great example of a well-built, useful software application. It has a nice straightforward user interface and you simply point it at your database, select one or two options, press the button and seconds later a well-presented set of HTML documentation exists which describes your database in great detail. If you want you can select which database objects are documented but the tool gives you very little control over the output it produces, and in my opinion, this is its strength. In the words of the advert, it does exactly what it says on the tin - produces high quality documentation of your database without fuss. I can imagine that some users may find the lack of customisation and configuration disconcerting but personally I think it's fantastic as the default behaviour is exactly what I want from a database documenting tool. Best of all, in less than 2 minutes after installing the application I'd produced my first full set of documentation for one of our production databases. It doesn't get much better than that! If you're looking for a tool that does a good job of documenting your databases then just buy SQL Doc.
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