Words I thought I would never have a legitimate reason to utter, particularly with respect to SQL Prompt 3. But then life’s full of surprises.

Many of you will have noticed that late last week I finally decided to stick my head above the parapet and make some sort of comment that might possibly be construed as a public announcement about the upcoming version 3 beta. I was thinking, “There’s only a week to go. What can possibly go wrong?”

You can see my mistake can’t you? The answer of course is that this is software and anything can go wrong.

It duly did, and I was going to make some stuffy face-saving corporate-sounding announcement about how “the team has discussed the issues and taken the very hard decision to delay the SQL Prompt 3 beta, and that we’re very sorry for any disappointment this causes to our customers.” Now part of that statement is true. We are very sorry for any disappointment this causes to our customers (we’re also somewhat disappointed ourselves), but the decision was not hard to make. It was the only sensible thing to do.

The truth is that we ran into problems, as often happens when developing software, and that they rather inconsiderately took quite a lot longer to fix than would have been ideal, or in fact even moderately sub-optimal. And we kind of thought, well, with all the hype and expectation, it’s not going to look too clever if the version 3 beta is a bit of a badger, and yeah, we could rush something out for this Friday, but we’d rather release something better in a couple of weeks that wasn’t rushed out, and wasn’t in some sense a bit half-arsed. And plus in any case, I can’t be doing with deadlines that gradually slip and slip. If you’re going to slip a deadline then slip the thing properly. If you’re going to buy yourself some time then make sure you buy enough to get the job done, otherwise it just gets everyone on your team down and becomes even more irritating for your customers.

So the bottom line is that I am very sorry to have to announce that the SQL Prompt 3 beta will be delayed for two weeks, and will now be released on August 25th rather than tomorrow. On the plus side it does give you an extra couple of weeks to sign up for it, and you can find out more at http://www.red-gate.com/MessageBoard/viewtopic.php?t=2567.