AdeptSQL Workshop

Adept SQL Workshop supports all phases of database schema development from writing (or generating from an existing database) a set of SQL sources to the debugging and to the subsequent database synchronization when the scripts are changed. Adept SQL Workshop is specifically designed to deal with the DDL subset of SQL and the schema synchronization. It complements query building and analyzing tools like MS Query Analyzer rather then competes with them.

An important part of Adept SQL Workshop is a convenient text editor with SQL syntax highlighting and shortcuts for commonly used SQL statements. A separate "statement list" panel groups, by the affected schema object, all SQL statements, providing instant access to any statement in any of the open project scripts.

Before the scripts are fed to the SQL server, they are passed through a macro pre-processor. With a usual combination of #includes, #defines and conditional compilation directives, you can put into a single declaration file macros for all project-specific data types or commonly used field combinations. This will help you to keep the project scripts compact, consistent, DBMS-independent and easy to modify. In Adept SQL Workshop, any of the preprocessed SQL statements can be previewed and executed. You can set breakpoints, run or step-through specific scripts or all scripts in the project. Query results can be displayed in a separate window. An SQL project can be very easily re-created from an existing database. Not only Adept SQL Workshop generates the SQL scripts based on the database schema, it also provides many convenient ways to split the resulting script to multiple modules and to replace, where appropriate, raw SQL with project-defined macros. Most databases, except for trivial ones, can be split into logical sections (groups of tables, views, procedures, etc) relatively independent from each other. Implementing each of the groups as a separate script make the schema sources much easier to view and maintain. The project-oriented approach used in Adept SQL Workshop makes it very natural to construct your database from many script files which all share the same set of macro declarations. You can easily add, remove or rearrange scripts within the project, execute all or selected scripts. Adept SQL Workshop fully understands the DDL subset of MS Transact-SQL (CREATE/DROP/ALTER statements and the stored procedure calls modifying the schema, like "exec sp_addtype"). The program can build an internal schema representation right from the SQL sources and then do various interesting things with it, like comparing against the database schema and producing the difference scripts. This means that the same SQL script can be run against the live database any number of times without affecting unchanged tables. It will emit only the minimal SQL necessary to synchronize the source and the database, therefore greatly simplifying changes in the database. Adept SQL Workshop optionally generates history scripts, which can be played on customers remote machine to synchronize their database with your master copy. This play-back is done by a stand-alone utility, which can be run either as a simple and user-friendly GUI application or silently from a command line. Preparing a database for versioning, you associate with it a history script - an SQL file describing, in one or more version sections, the current database schema. Having made changes to the database schema, you can then update the history script with a single menu command. The program will match the current database schema against the last schema recorded in the history script, then append the changes to the history under a new version number.

Since all your database structures are kept in SQL scripts (text files), the regular version control methods can be used to manage the team work. If several developers are responsible for the development of specific logical sections of the database, they can work independently on their SQL scripts (and their local copies of the database) using a 3-rd party source code control software. Adept SQL Workshop includes the basic version control commands in its user interface, interfacing with a specific VCS software through a separate plug-in module.