SQL Diagnostic Manager for Microsoft SQL Server helps database administrators to find and fix Microsoft SQL Server performance problems in physical, virtual, and cloud environments. Unlike its competition, it provides effective scalability, advanced SQL query analysis and optimization, prescriptive analysis with corrective SQL scripts, powerful automated alert responses, broad PowerShell integration, complete customization, and extensive support for current and legacy Microsoft SQL Server and…
$1,996
per instance with first year maintenance included
Liquibase
Score 8.6 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Liquibase is a database change management tool that extends DevOps best practices to the database, helping teams release software faster and safer by bringing the database change process into existing CI/CD automation. According to the 2021 Accelerate State of DevOps Report, elite performers are 3.4 times more likely to incorporate database change management into their process than low performers. Liquibase value proposition: Liquibase speeds up the development…
N/A
Redgate SQL Toolbelt Essentials
Score 9.5 out of 10
N/A
Redgate's SQL Toolbelt Essentials includes industry-standard tools for SQL Server development & deployment, enabling users to include SQL Server databases in agile processes and enabilng developers to embed robust and scalable development practices.
Liquibase is head and shoulders better than relying on SQL Compare alone for deployments. I haven't used Flyway, but based on our evaluation, Liquibase seemed to have a lot of functional overlap for considerably less cost. I would recommend the use of GitHub or Bitbucket in …
SQL Server [Business Intelligence] Manager is useful for tracking performance across SSIS, SSRS and SSA and have the data represented in dashboards. It helps improve performance and helps end users. However, several features are redundant for smaller organization that can use the tools that comes with existing Microsoft products. These features also takes time to learn and use.
Based on my experience so far on using Liquibase in my current project, I have seen that Liquibase changelogs are version control where multiple team members and developers can work together on database and deployed automatically via CI/CD Pipeline integration using github actions and it applies same changelogs to all enviroments to remain in sync and avoid any enviroment drift. Also as Liquibase stores changelog audits in DATABASECHANGELOG table it helps in tracking purposes and to easily rollback any change . Whereas in some scenarios I feel that Liquibase have some drawbacks where if complex transformation between tables is not optimized for bulk data operations which eventually degrades database performance.
We use SQL Compare to troubleshoot performance problems quite a bit since our data model is more like a template and not everything is 100% in sync and customization occurs between different client databases. We continually get pulled into performance issues and the developers will say Client A is performing different than Client B, why? Using SQL Compare, we usually find that one client was tuned and had indexes altered or added that weren't deployed to all clients or other objects weren't deployed correctly during the release. On the other hand, since our data model practices allow client databases to drift I tried to create a new golden image by trying to compare multiple databases based on the same data model and found it to be a very difficult process to complete using SQL Compare. SQL Compare gave me too much information and doesn't allow enough filtering to eliminate a lot of the noise.
SQLdm does a good job of providing information at a high level, but also allows me to drill down to specific queries and events if needed. I don't always need to sift through tons of details to get the information I need. It also gives a very wide range of information from SQL specific metrics, to OS metrics, to VM metrics, all the way up to host server metrics.
I like how the alert and notification system can be customized. For example, if you know a certain server regularly has long-running queries, you can adjust the alert to not fire unless a query has been running for 30 minutes while the rest of the servers fire after 30 seconds. That is very helpful in not being bombarded at dinner with alerts from a server similar to, "I've been at 90% cpu for 26 milliseconds!!!!!!!...and now it's back down to 30%" Good information to know, but not something you need to literally lose sleep over.
I like how you can configure different servers to be monitored differently. For example, you can have a group of servers called DEVELOPMENT that you can turn on heavier monitoring on so you can test how changes in applications might affect the SQL environment, but in the PRODUCTION group, you may only want to enable the heavier analysis and logging when performance issues are actively being reported.
Liquibase tracks changes in a metadata table contained directly in the target database, making easy administration for the DBA.
Liquibase handles many validation tests out of the box, making it easy to choose which ones you want to include, with options for writing your own if you choose. This makes it robust and flexible in terms of validation before deployment.
Liquibase provides easy integration into deployment pipelines for CI/CD. We use it with GitHub for source control and Circle CI for validation and deployment pipelines.
Simple and easy comparison of database schemas and data. Differences can be copied or synced from one database to another with a click of a button.
You can save "projects" so that you can easily rerun a previous comparison whenever you need to.
It has a very simple, easy to learn interface. I've never needed to read any documentation or watch any tutorials in order to figure out how to do something.
Windows client has some issues. When you have small time intervals for your data collection, it can cause the client to become unresponsive and require you to restart it.
It takes more time to get the web client running than it does to get the windows client running.
The visualizations have been the same for the last eight years--could use a little bit of a refresh.
I would like Liquibase to explore all errors in the changelog files compared to one at a time. We spent a lot of time troubleshooting one error at a time versus having a batch log of errors in each file.
Understanding where to get support on things. I spent a lot of time researching externally to learn what the best practices were. Although I found some of the youtube videos helpful, I would like a little more of a technical support. This may be a feature with the paid tier, however, we leveraged open source.
Seeing more examples of how others use Liquibase and their usecases will be helpful. That way we can learn from each other which may help us improve on our own deployments.
Pricing.... I wish there was an inexpensive developer version I could buy for myself.
Portability.... I would like to use it from a flash drive so I can use it where ever I am asked to work.
Unbundled.... This may be available already but I dont' recall I can buy it cheaply as a stand-alone product. Its only part of the bundle - cost effectively.
We are and will continue using Liquibase and it has become an integral part of our portfolio offering, any new product is by default adopting Liquibase stack.
Liquibase has several features, on their free plan, that matches exactly our expectations and needs: this already makes it standout from its competitors. On top of that, the setup was straightforward: we are running an integration with Databricks, and there were only two steps truly needed, install the driver and the plugin, done. This is the type of seamless experience our team appreciates the most when evaluating a tool or service.
Liquibase has been responsive and even is letting our group test some new products they are developing and even made code changes to their production system because of a couple bugs we have reported. Liquibase licensing has also been easy and simple. I have nothing bad to say about any of the Liquibase staff I have talked to. They also hold free information webinars for new content that helps spread adoption and moving the product forward.
IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL, Redgate SQL, and MonitorLogicMonitor are similar products to each other. We decided on IDERA SQL Diagnostic Manager for SQL because our experience with locating heavy queries has been very good and it provides real-time monitoring of all servers and databases. It also allows you to have a large volume of historical data which allows you to analyze trends in the databases.
There is no real competitor when it comes to what Liquibase does - at least not at the time we considered it three years ago. It was an easy choice in this regard, but we could have said no to it if it made our workload more difficult. But our proof of concept showed there were easy wins to be had by implementing its software.
I've used Visual Studio Database Projects for this type of work in the past with some success, but Redgate SQL Compare is faster, more transparent, and simply easier to use. Faster is self explanatory. More transparent, means that it's much easier to set up your desired options for schema change deployment scripts. Easier to use, It's really dead simple. Start a project, connect your source, connect destination, click compare.
