Until now, we’ve been looking at tools from a specific developer or platform. We covered ApexSQL, dbForge, and native Azure tools. In this final list, we’ll be going through tools from different developers and they won’t be from one specific company or platform. So let’s get to it.
SQL Backup and FTP
SQL Backup and FTP creates a backup by partnering with storage services such as Amazon S3. All backups created by the tool are compatible with MySQL, PostgreSQL, RDS, Azure SQL, and other platforms. The tool performs different kinds of backups, including full and differential backups, backing up transaction logs, backing up files and folders, and it can even encrypt them if necessary.
SQL Compare
SQL Compare is a server database schema comparison tool developed by Red Gate. It enables you to compare two schemas, also create scripts for deployment and execute them. You can also do so for temporal tables, understand how the objects from two different schemas differ from one another, and check every line in SQL code for differences.
Furthermore, the tool creates reports in HTML and Excel formats for all comparisons, helps you automate the deployment process, or can be made to run it directly from the command line.
SQL Data Examiner
SQL Data Examiner is a multipurpose tool that enables data migration, comparison, and replication. One can also consolidate data from different database branches into a central database, work data of different formats with one query, and even restore data. It is compatible with PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, and other database management systems.
Besides all this, the data examiner also helps with the automation of data comparison and the generation of advanced reports. The report formats can be HTML or plain text, and all the differences between the data are highlighted to make developers better understand what they are working with.
SQL Diagnostic Manager
SQL Diagnostic Manager is a tool developed by Idera and it helps with different aspects of database operations. These include performance monitoring, real-time alerting, carrying out diagnostics and analysis, enterprise management, and more.
You can have real-time monitoring over your different database servers while also getting alerts at any point if the system detects anomalies or threats. This threat/anomaly detection is carried out with the help of its analytics feature.
You can also manage jobs by knowing their last updated status, start/stop them based on your requirements, and understand how they are doing by getting a high level picture of the rate of overall success or failures. Besides this, one can also manage the CPU and memory usage on different instances. With the tool, one can prevent deadlocks and bottlenecks and save disk space.
SQL Doctor
SQL Doctor is yet another tool by Idera which helps keep check of the database servers’ health. It enables you to perform regular checks of all database instances to understand how it’s been performing. It analyses data and provides insights into various categories, including deadlocks, disk usage, disasters, index optimization, open transactions, database configuration, etc.
Based on the insights, SQL Doctor also creates summaries highlighting the patterns followed by the database servers. Beyond this, it also gives us a list of recommendations that can help optimize the servers based on their ranking.
If you want to implement some of those suggestions, the platform can help with generating scripts that can execute the recommendations. However, it also generates reverse scripts that can undo your changes if you’re not satisfied with them.
SQL Data Modelling
Idera also offers a data modeling tool, which is essentially a data governance platform for architects. Using this tool, one can look at the different requirements coming from stakeholders and translate them into designs.
One can create conceptual models and design tools that can help build entity-relationship diagrams, create data catalogs, manage metadata, document data sets, and many more.
Conclusion
With this list, we come to the end of the four-part series, which highlights database tools for Azure SQL databases. It is essential to understand that different developers can provide tools for the same function. So you need to compare and decide which one supports your requirements and works better.
Besides the developers mentioned in this series, numerous other developers, such as RazorSQL, Aireforge, Altova, and more, provide database tools. So do your research, experiment with different kinds in an environment where trial and error is possible, and then settle down with the ones you think are best.
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