Digging Around In Codeplex
Codeplex is probably the best source for Microsoft focused projects. You will find a lot more than just base SQL Server bits. Codeplex covers a large range of technologies and also covers pretty much every aspect of SQL Server. Codeplex isn’t as old as SourceForge so if you do find a project that has been abandoned it may not be too old to use or may be easier to update. When Codeplex finally added git support they on me over in a big bad way. The search feature is a bit simplistic but you still have some sorting and filtering options available to you.
SQL Power Doc
SQL Power Doc is a collection of Windows PowerShell scripts and modules that discover, document, and diagnose SQL Server instances and their underlying Windows OS & machine configurations. SQL Power Doc works with all versions of SQL Server from SQL Server 2000 through 2012, and all versions of Windows Server and consumer Windows Operating Systems from Windows 2000 and Windows XP through Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8. SQL Power Doc is also capable of documenting Windows Azure SQL Databases.
This thing is just crazy in the amount of data it gathers along with base recommendations it can produce. I’ve used this a few times and have yet to find it lacking. It isn’t the speediest thing but if you need to get a look at an environment for the first time I’d recommend you take it for a spin.
SQL SPADE
SPADE simplifies the process of standing up a new SQL Server instance by applying standard Operating System pre-configurations, Installing SQL Server and then applying post-configurations and creating standard objects.
SPADE is a tool that is designed to speed up your standard deploymets of SQL Server. You may be saying “But I can already do an unsattended install”…but that’s not all that’s involved in most server builds. There are Operating System configurations like Microsoft Distrubuted Transaction Coordinator (MSDTC), Local Security Policy and others. I’m sure that you also have standard SQL objects that need to be deployed like Stored Procedures, Agent Jobs, Operators, etc. All of this can be done by SPADE automatically by running 1 simple PowerShell script.
SQL SPADE is a tool I’ve come to rely on more and more these days. Mike Wells has put a ton of work into automating something that can be difficult at the best of times. This is a complete end to end solution for deploying SQL Server.
DatabaseLint
DBLint is an automated tool for analyzing database designs. DBLints ensures a consistent and maintainable database design by identifying bad design patterns.
Evaluating the quality and consistency of a database schema by a manual review is time-consuming and error-prone. To accommodate this challenge, we propose DBLint, a fast, configurable, and extensible tool for automated analysis of database design. DBLint currently includes 46 design rules derived from good database design practices. The rules discover design errors, which are collected as issues and presented in an interactive report. The issues are used to calculate a score for each table and an overall score. The scores are based on the severities of the issues, their location in the schema, and a table-importance measure. DBLint has been tested extensively on more than 35 real-world schemas, identifying a large number of relevant issues. Developers from four organizations have evaluated DBLint and found it to be useful and relevant, in particular the overall score and report.
This is one of the more unusual yet useful projects I’ve come across in a very long time. I’m a huge fan of lint’ers for lots of other languages having a toolset like this for SQL Server I’ve been evaluating it and will probably be rolled into our build tools.
Up next: GitHub