Yesterday I had some SQL work and was playing with SQL Prompt inside of SQL Management Studio. Mind you I had evaluated it against SqlAssist and found that the then beta SqlAssist seemed to show promise of being a much better product (even though it ONLY worked in Visual Studio).
Red Gate is recently acquired the product. I love Red Gate’s products (they are what you need), and several people had asked me what I thought now that SQL Prompt is free (at least until September). Honestly it sounded like some court cases I’d heard about involving a certain company in Redmond and a certain browser company. Anyway, I thought I’d take SQL Prompt for another spin.
The big hint of how this all turned out is in the fact that I linked to the competitor (DISCLOSURE: Round Polygons gave me a license to SqlAssist for my efforts helping them during their beta cycle… they don’t own me, but I do like them as well as I like Red Gate).
I really have 2 beefs with the product (that SQLAssist doesn’t seem to have).
1) SQL Prompt seems to lose context easily, and it either gives me too much info or not enough. SqlAssist in comparison knows that when I’m writing a stored proc to include Parameters (at the appropriate time) for the Stored Proc. It also offers the tables field names in inserts (which was the reasons I quit using SQL Management Studio and switched quickly back to Visual Studio and SqlAssist… BTW, SqlAssist is going to have a SQL Management Studio version, pretty soon)
2) After running for a while I’ve noticed that my machine starts running slow… SQL Prompt seems to be eating a bit more memory than it should (at least when I turned it off my laptop stopped having seizures). SqlAssist doesn’t appear to have any adverse affects to my environment… probably because it’s not a service monitoring my apps looking for SQL being entered (or however SQL Prompt does it’s thing)…
My prediction is that in September a new version of SQL Prompt will be released and it will not be free. It will resolve the issues I just mentioned and I will need to re-assess… I’d even bet the price tag of $30 will come back.
IMO, it’s probably worth the time and frustration to spend the $30 on SqlAssist (if you must have SQL intellisense) instead of going with the free one… or be like me and be an asset to Round Polygons and convince them to give you a free copy.