Likelihood to Recommend This tool is useful for small and large IT departments and associated data analysts that perform direct database functions such as DBA tasks or extracting/importing data. Non-technical staff members would not benefit from this tool as much as the functions are detailed and technical. However, automation engineers will find this tool very open for automation, and can generate the scripting code for any of its functions.
Read full review This solution is perfect for a team with a large server count and, at least, moderate experience supporting a SQL Server environment. If the environment is smaller or the team has less experience working with SQL Server performance tuning methodologies, then the tool may be overwhelming for the users.
Read full review Pros Connection manager (we use it through ssh tunnels) works effortlessly. Great sync tools for both database schemas and data. Storing code snippets to be used when needed. Nice code suggestions while typing queries. Usually does very well with storing your session and opening all of your sql tabs when opening the apps next time. Does very well when executing large sql files (without opening the files into the application that is). Pretty good debugging help when a problem occurs in executing a query or a files with multiple queries. Read full review The Top SQL functionality has been extremely useful for identifying poorly performing queries by resource consumption. The flexibility of creating your own Advisory Conditions has allowed us to integrate our custom internal alerts into a centralized dashboard and alerting platform. Being able to highlight any chart on the dashboard and then tool-matching that window across all the other charts makes it much easier to correlate the different performance metrics against each other. Read full review Cons The ability to parameterize searches more would be advantageous. For example, being able to specify to only look for certain columns, certain data type changes, etc. The output reports from dbForge are very plain and could contain more detail, and perhaps be structured more like a pivot table form Excel Read full review Tuning advice: With all the graphs and data available, it's not always easy to determine the best thing to do. I'd like to see SentryOne provide some best practice analysis based on the historical information collected for the server being looked at. They could add help tips or links to help documents, when you select a graph on the dashboard. Inexperienced users tend to put blinders on and focus on one thing when they see a high counter or something out of the ordinary. It would be very useful to include a link that provides underlying help. The link would provide an explanation of the counter in detail and offer possible explanations as to why the counter is off. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Absolutely. SQL Sentry is an absolute must have for any company with a SQL Server estate. It provides a force multiplier to effectively manage SQL Server, and the feature sets are second to none. The support and expertise at SentryOne is incredible. They are very supportive of both the platform users and helping your business with the product
Read full review Usability I accept that the flexibility of the alerting comes at a price. Other than the alerting SQL Sentry's interface is intuitive. Connecting to a new SQL instance, given that all the needed ports are open in your firewalls is straight forward. Reviewing the performance and queries for an instance is available in with a right click. As you dig in new tabs are created to present the detailed data. I find the ability to filter and rollup metrics on a query very helpful in dealing with the "it's running slow". You can easily compare the metrics of run times for the same query to let the user know, it's probably data your doing a billion reads instead of the usual 100 thousand.
Read full review Reliability and Availability The system is working perfectly in capturing data, but we do experience issues with SQL Timeout when viewing results in the remote clients. This may be due to the fact that our monitoring service is consuming most of the CPU, and it is the same server that is hosting the SQL Repository. We could probably fix the issue by separating the SQL instance from the monitoring service.
Read full review Performance In most cases the pages load very quickly. In our particular case, we need to do some movement of services to separate our monitoring service to separate infrastructure from the repository. When we first started with SQL Sentry on 5 licenses, we did not have any issues. Since we have now grown that to 25, we are experiencing some challenges. We do not believe this to be a tool problem
Read full review Support Rating Although experience here is limited, as only one question has been asked and answered promptly, the registration and licensing process was very smooth and professional. There are forums online that discuss dbForge issues, as well as a Facts and Questions section on dbForge's website, so product support does seem to exist if needed.
Read full review From their infancy as a smaller company to now as a global player they have always kept focus on prioritising he customer. They know their product and the technology it supports and are easily accessible for both resolving problems with the product all the way to adding value through additional training and assisting with getting return on investment through utilisation of the many features the product provides.
Read full review In-Person Training sql sentry expert came onsight to review the performance of installation and gave us a good insight to using the tool
Read full review Implementation Rating Was suggested that we install the process monitors on a dev or qa database server, but we found it more useful to create an IT db server and put it there (along with a few other apps that we use for monitoring).
Read full review Alternatives Considered Before choosing dbForge Studio I evaluated at least a dozen tools, especially on the Visual Query Builder function. For now, I have identified only one product that has a better Visual Query Builder than dbForge Studio. This other product also manages UNIONs, while dbStudio still doesn't do it visually. However, the better alternative product is enormously slower in operations and less feature-rich than DbForge Studio
Read full review SQL Sentry offers more features and is customize-able to fit our business needs. It has more centralized management and support. The company's technical support is also top notch. It is also worth mentioning that SentryOne Team Blog is an excellent source. One can find lots of valuable troubleshooting skills on the blog site - very educational and informational.
Read full review Scalability We are running 25 instances through a single monitoring service and it is able to keep up. We are finding that this many instances in our environment is about as many as can be handled. We will need to deploy additional monitoring services. Luckily, there is no additional licensing costs to deploy additional monitoring services. For us, it's just an additional Azure VM.
Read full review Return on Investment Saved a TON of time when looking at massive amounts of parent/child data by allowing us to just use the master-detail browser. Very little training time needed for employees that are already used to using SQL Management Studio. This is a proper Windows UI application. Very cost effective to purchase the standard edition for every employee that needs it, but the free edition does most of what they need too! Read full review Better customer service as it alerts me automatically to loss of service issues so I can react and either get things fixed before it impacts the customers or to let my management know as soon as possible It helps me find expensive SQL so our customers get better performance and we make better use of our resources Read full review ScreenShots dbForge Studio (Edge) Screenshots SolarWinds SQL Sentry Screenshots