There is a great deal of activity on the Red-Gate forums at the moment. In fact, they are a fascinating read. Often, the threads take off in ways that nobody can really predict. My particular pleasure is in reading the 'off the cuff' remarks such as 'I have servers in NYC, Los Angeles, Pakistan, and India.' or 'I imported roughly 200 servers with over a thousand databases. The servers are distributed throughout the mid-West', or 'The number of servers I will be supporting is jumping to over 200 in the next few months' that give a glimpse of life at the DBA coal-face.
One of the best, if you haven't looked, is the thread that started off on the Refactor Forum. Andras asked 'We support nearly forty options to customize laying out SQL, but is it enough?'. There were 41 responses, and the resulting thread was wildly popular. There are so many different ways of formatting SQL and there seemed to be an advocate for every one.
Here is a subject where programmers will argue for hours. For example, although I agree with the great Joe Celco (SQL Programming Style 2005) about putting reserved words in Upper Case, we had people wanting everything in lower case. You're never going to please everybody, especially not Joe.
So, is there going to be a version that includes all the different layouts? Mike O'Neil wasn't the only one wanting to know. I'm a great fan of Refactor, but I've never quite tweaked the layout exactly how I want. Wthere wasn't great encouragement about a new version despite the interest in formatting. The roadmap only goes to the end of Q1 of this year so lets' hope Q2 for a new version as this is the Red-Gate tool I rely on the most.
There is hope, though as SQL Prompt 3.8 will hopefully be available at the end of Q1. The Pro version evidently incorporates the Layout SQL functionality from SQL Refactor. It is an interesting move, since a lot of people aren't quite sure of the difference between the two products. and one wonders if the new Pro version will prove to be the logical line of development for the products
SQL Prompt 3.7 patch release came out quietly, but the product is improving the whole time. I very quickly learned to set 'triggering' to manual (Cntl+Spacebar) when using SQL Prompt, and find it very handy as it cuts down on the need to keep accessing the Object Browser.
The SQL Data compare forum had a wonderful thread where people were asking for enhancements to the product and Richard kept bobbing up and explaining that they were there already. For me it was rivetting to hear of extreme problems encountered by users such as 'tons of tables with no indexes'.
Over on the Alpha/Beta forums, the buzz around the Data Generator is dying down now as the developers start to assimilate all the feedback, and code the good ideas into the next beta. Now it is the turn of Dan and the SQL Response Beta.
As I write this, it is early days, and I suspect that there will be a huge diversity of opinion on the things that should be monitored in SQL Server to give it a health-check. In the pub, it is always a debate that ends in flushed faces and Beer-glasses getting thrown.
The Red-Gate site now has Blogs. I must admit that I had slightly mixed feelings about this, probably because someone tried to copy the existing blogs across from Simple-Talk and all the comments dropped off like autumn leaves, causing much confusion. However, Neil rallied round and started cross-posting from his wonderful blog on BusinessOfSoftware, However, the true purpose of the Red-Gate Blogs was illustrated best by David Connell in How to write a Generator for SQL Data Generator 1.0 Beta, whereas over here, Lionel showed how well a Red-Gate developer could blog on Simple-Talk with his SQL Puzzle 9