Red Gate would get my money, if I had any

This is how software companies should respond when a potential customer finds a problem with their product. I recently tested out Red Gate’s SQL Prompt and found some problems with it in my environment. The TL;DR is that it wasn’t auto-completing and I was getting timeout errors when trying to use it with a 161 thousand table and 3.3 million column database. After my testing and uninstalling the demo, I left my comments and the URL to my post detaling my experience in the uninstall survey. Not everyone likes filling out surveys, but they can provide valuable feedback and possibly effect change. Not long after I submitted I received this email.

Hi Tim,

I’m one of the developers of Prompt and I just saw your uninstall feedback about running out of memory with a huge database.

Unfortunately at the moment I don’t have any solutions for you (a work around is to exclude the database from being loaded which will stop the exception but won’t get you suggestions). We do have plans in the future for solving this by optimising how and where we store our model of the database.

I can let you know when we have a new build with those optimisations in place if you’d be willing to try it?

Thanks,
Aaron.

They are listening and working to improve their product. Yeah, I’ll take some time to test out a new version. Will I end up buying it? I’m not so sure about that. Budgets can be tight in any organization, but working at a non-profit has caused me to scrutenize every purchase extra carefully. I’ve worked without SQL Prompt for a long time and can continue to do my job without. Would I like to have it, (assuming a new version that works for me) of course. Will I be able to justify the purchase and ROI? Hopefully.

Speaking of working for a non-profit. Mercy Corps is doing great work to help survivors in Nepal, please consider a donation.

Going for another month of #SQLNewBlogger