These products can help make your occasional forays into the world of databases much easier to take.
Sometimes you don’t need a full-fledged database-management environment. Maybe you just need to go in and add a field, change a table or write an ad hoc query.
Certainly you can do all those things in the SQL Server administration tools, writing your own SQL at the command line. Unless you’re a SQL expert, though, that process can be lengthy and error-prone.
Having a graphical tool that’s easy to learn and use — and one that you don’t have to use every day to remember how to perform simple actions — is much more productive. Simply point it at the database, click the mouse to tell the tool what to do and your database maintenance is done.
For 90 percent of the time, you don’t need a heavy-duty DBA product — you just need to make a quick modification. With more and more system and network administration tools using SQL Server or other relational databases as their repository, having access to a simple database tool is almost a necessity. While database system tools are designed to run mostly without intervention, you still need access to the data for analysis or compliance purposes. A few of these admin tools offer a good way of doing that. Altova Database Spy, Quest Toad and Embarcadero DBArtisan are easy for non-DBAs to install and use, and they have surprising power when doing work on databases.
Read more: Tooling Around in Your Database
