One of my favorite database tools is dbdesc from Logica2. I’ve reviewed it in the past. It’s simple, inexpensive and does its job quickly and well.
Recently, I’ve had some turnover on my team, in addition to the usual bouncing around, and database scripts became out of date with what was in the database. I got the “all clear†to refresh a database, and ended up wiping out some recent changes. I couldn’t recreate the tables and stored procedures from their creation scripts, but fortunately I had run dbdesc earlier and had its output to work with (you can run it as a command line tool and include it in your automated builds). Dbdesc includes the CREATE scripts in its documentation, so I copied and pasted and executed and ran into a problem.
After a little poking around, I noticed that the tables were all being created as dbo.schema.tablename. Upon closer examination (and this took a while to find), I saw that dbdesc was outputting the CREATE as
[schema.tablename]
rather than
[schema].[tablename]
This small difference is what led to the creation errors. Manually fixing the sql script solved my problem, and I reported the issue to Logica2. This is where the tale of great customer support begins.
I sent in the bug report via their website at around 3pm on Friday. About three hours later, I had a reply from Jose that he was looking into the issue. Not a bad response time, and I wasn’t expecting any update until today (Monday). At 11:12 pm Saturday, I get another email from Jose saying the issue has been fixed and a link to the new installer. Very impressive, especially since it would be Monday before I was back at work and would need the software. This was probably a very simple issue to fix, but nonetheless it received prompt attention on a weekend. My previous build was 730, and the updated build was 737.
Thanks, Jose and Logica2, I love your products even more!