Review - Apex SQL Edit
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Comments posted to this topic are about the content posted at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/columnists/bkelley/review
K. Brian Kelley
@kbriankelley -
I've been using this since it was SQLEd, prior to Apex purchasing it, and was fortunate enough to get it for under $50 back then. They've improved the product immensely since then.
One of the biggest pluses with the product is their tech support staff, any errors automatically create dump files which you can send to their tech support email address. The longest I've had to wait for a response is 2 hours, and that was with a link to a fix for my problem. A lot of companies could take note of this.
Upside, it works really well and is great for developmental work. Downside, it's a bit slow and cumbersome and has a habit of occassionally bombing out, so remember to save your work frequently. Also sourcesafe intergration is something you have to be careful with, if you pull an object from sourcesafe then someone else makes changes and you pull it again from sourcesafe you will not see the changes unless you delete the file that was placed in your workfolder.
Other than that, buy it.
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I've just used Apex SQL Edit for the first time.
Pasting in a stored procedure from one of our development DB's I was a bit surprised to find that the Parse feature does not pick up on invalid column names. It's not until you atually execute a CREATE procedure that this comes to light.
"Check Syntax" when editing in Enterprise Manager detects this fundamental error - am I doing something wrong?
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Nicholas,
thx for post. We're continuing to crank out fix/feature releases and should have support for SCC compliant version control systems like Vault soon.
Pls check back often for new releases.
Brian Lockwood
President
ApexSQL - SQL Developer Essentials -
... and I forgot. pls vote Edit for best SQL IDE and support low priced / free support / free upgrade software product
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/survey/TakeSurvey.asp?SurveyID=l41m63KHl66KG
Brian Lockwood
President
ApexSQL - SQL Developer Essentials -
First of all, the product has far more features than discussed in the article. For instance, it can create from a query a standalone client viewer executable that can be emailed to someone as a quick report.
Another feature: you can double-click on a value in a column of the query results and lookup this value in another table you will select from the popup prompt.
There are tons of other features as well. What's bad, however, is that little of them work satisfactory. On overall, the product would be good as beta, but in my opinion, it's quality is far from the release.
It's slow. Thing as trivial as opening new query window takes 20 seconds or so on 2GHz/1GB machine.
Every now and then, it bombs out. Must save your work every 5 minutes.
Visual Query fails to parse anything non-trivial. Worse yet, after such failure, it erases the query completely. Say, you work on a query, then you add more to it, then you try to switch to the visual mode - oops, already can't do that, bad luck, your query text is now gone.
By the way, speaking of the article - indeed, there's no query diagram in Query Analyzer; but there's one in Enterprise Manager, and, unlike Apex, it does not take one minute to initialize.
The above are just few examples; in fact, working with this product, I hit things like those every 5 minutes - things that are maybe OK in alpha or beta, but that should not be happening in released products.
From experience of working with this product for several weeks, I came to the conclusion that it's an interesting and impressive toy to play with, but it's definitely not a tool that might be reliably used by a developer in "production mode".
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"By the way, speaking of the article - indeed, there's no query diagram in Query Analyzer; but there's one in Enterprise Manager, and, unlike Apex, it does not take one minute to initialize."
Excellent point... However, in Enterprise Manager, you can not perform INSERT FROM, INSERT INTO, UPDATE, or DELETE queries that involves joins (refer to my article at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/columnists/dcorey/buildingjoinstheeasyway.asp). You can do this with ApexSQL Edit. However, I did have difficulties deleting tables from the Visual Query window once they were added. Also, to change the catalog, I had to exit the software and start over. Maybe I missed something there.
All the best,
DaleAuthor: An Introduction to SQL Server 2005 Management Studio
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FROM, INSERT INTO, UPDATE, or DELETE queries that involves joins <snip> You can do this with ApexSQL Edit.
well... let's try.
UPDATE PART SET WEIGHT=USER_1 FROM WORK_ORDER INNER JOIN PART ON PART.ID=WORK_ORDER.BASE_ID
press "visual query"
15 seconds wait; then exactly what I said before: it can't parse it. Unpress "visual query" - alas, even the text is now gone.
Retype with a minor change; another try; now it crashes with unhandled exception.
Things like this on every step. I mentioned before that it can create a standalone viewer. Indeed, but when I emailed it to a coworker, he called and began to read the message about the missing dll. Ended up with sending him excel file, as usual.
By the way, speaking of unhandled exceptions: one of the real benefits of visual studio.net is much better handling and encapsulation of exceptions. Enclose everything in try...catch, and exceptions will go. Too much work?
Also, to change the catalog, I had to exit the software and start over. Maybe I missed something there
ctrl-shift-G , or shortcut menu/change catalog in query window (the menu erronsouly says it's ctrl-G)
As I understand, this product does not have a beta phase. Big mistake. Too eager to sell?
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Vadim,
The client executable uses no external DLLs other than those in the .NET framework so the coworker probably didn't have .NET installed on their PC which is why the client viewer didn't work.
Also, I think Undo will bring back Visual Query statements (maybe, I haven't checked it).
Ashton
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"press 'visual query'
15 seconds wait; then exactly what I said before: it can't parse it. Unpress 'visual query' - alas, even the text is now gone.
Retype with a minor change; another try; now it crashes with unhandled exception."
In all fairness Vadim, I did not experience this problem. In fact, it parsed just fine over and over. Were you using the latest version?
All the best,
DaleAuthor: An Introduction to SQL Server 2005 Management Studio
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version = 2.10.0.0
I wonder however why are you asking only the version, and not tables' schema, indexes, relations, load of the server, version of the server, and 100 other parameters required in order to professionally reproduce anything.
That's why beta testing by dozens or hundreds of testers is an absolutely mandatory part of the product development. If every problem was experienced by everyone, programmer's life would be much, much easier. For instance, several weeks ago I finally figured out why Access application that works fine for dozens of users, permanently crashed on one particular machine. Turned out, it was caused by printer driver (though he did not even attempt to print). Do you also want to know the version of my printer driver, Dale?
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The Parse in Edit works like the Parse in QA and not the Check Syntax in EM. Basically, like QA, edit simply does a set parseonly on and then runs the query to get the results. I don't know how EM does a full syntax check unless it simply creates the procedure in a transaction and looks for errors that way.
That might be something we could add to Edit though in a future release.
Ashton
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"Do you also want to know the version of my printer driver, Dale?"
No, are you kidding? Sounds like a job for ApexSQL. Even so, Sorry you had problems with the software. Maybe you can try developing an alternative?
All the best,
DaleAuthor: An Introduction to SQL Server 2005 Management Studio
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