Perforce P4 (formerly Helix Core) is the company's version control and peer code review solution. Perforce offers add-on products for code review for free, and Git support products.
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Precisely Assure MIMIX
Score 9.9 out of 10
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Assure MIMIX from Precisely (formerly Syncsort) offers IBM i high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) for companies worldwide, from small businesses to global enterprises, who can use Assure MIMIX to prevent data loss and eliminate planned and unplanned downtime. Assure MIMIX provides scalable real-time replication with options for automating administration, monitoring and alerting, customizable switch automation, and a graphical…
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Redgate SQL Toolbelt Essentials
Score 9.5 out of 10
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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.
$1,209
per year per user (1-4 users)
Pricing
Perforce P4
Precisely Assure MIMIX
Redgate SQL Toolbelt Essentials
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Pricing Offerings
Perforce P4
Precisely Assure MIMIX
Redgate SQL Toolbelt Essentials
Free Trial
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Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
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Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
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Community Pulse
Perforce P4
Precisely Assure MIMIX
Redgate SQL Toolbelt Essentials
Features
Perforce P4
Precisely Assure MIMIX
Redgate SQL Toolbelt Essentials
Version Control Software Features
Comparison of Version Control Software Features features of Product A and Product B
While Perforce Helix is the best version control software out there, it can also be used to track your documentation, training videos and materials, and requirements. If you have strict compliance requirements, it can be used to ensure that those requirements are satisfied. Perforce Helix is incredibly flexible and can meet the needs of individual users as well as companies with thousands of users.
MIMIX is clearly the best IBMi solution for most high availability and disaster recovery situations. It provides rock-solid replication and agile ability to switch quickly. In its earlier days, some organizations used it as a primary daily system backup method. With the advent of Ransomware, this is no longer advisable. The strength of MIMIX real-time replication becomes a weakness if IBMi data becomes infected. As in any real-time replication product, at that point, two systems are infected.
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.
The branching mechanisms in Perforce allow for an enormous codebase to be duplicated into release versions weekly with little impact upon things such as the speed of queries against the version control.
Action triggers permit such things as automated builds of software versions, dynamic messaging when issues are identified either within or prior to a build process, and much more.
Locking provides the ability to prevent modifications of stable, tested versions in order to ensure validity when they are released.
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.
Perforce tends to feel backwards in how it approaches certain tasks, like branching and integrating - even once you figure out how it wants you to perform these tasks, you will likely forget when it comes around to the next time you need to do them again.
Perforce has a higher price tag, comparatively.
Perforce make some tasks very easy, and yet other tasks very difficult - it doesn't always seem to have found its target user's proficiency.
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 fully committed to our use of Perforce. It works well within our organization and our desire to share our code base with our customers. Their support staff are responsive, inquisitive, and eager to improve their software. I feel like we have a direct line to their design/feature team as they often solicit our feedback.
With Perforce Helix, you can use it via the command line, via P4V, or any of the other APIs included with the product. It is extremely easy for new users to get up and running. Users of Perforce Helix only have to pull in the files of interest to them. Also, Perforce is very easy to script and integrate into your CI/CD pipeline. Streams allows you to have pinpoint control of your workflow, and P4Search is the absolute best--I wish Perforce (the company) would talk more about this. It is absolutely fabulous!
In our large environment, Perforce is rarely "down". We have regular maintenance windows and from time to time Perforce can feel a little slow, but its always available. Tech support has always worked with our engineers and IT department to make sure that any real performance or stability issues are addressed quickly.
MIMIX is software built for availability. By its nature it is must be available. As long as the underlying system and communication network are available MIMIX is working. And if there are failures in either of those, MIMIX is designed to allow for a quick and resilient recovery once underly systems or communications are restored
I have never seen MIMIX itself be a performance bottleneck. However it is important to consider the network in overall performance of any remotely replicated systems. MIMIX can only replicate as fast as the network allows. But a strong capability of MIMIX is its ability to "buffer" its replication, so it can be sent without error as the network allows
I had two representatives from Perforce contact me after downloading it but never responded when I had questions. I also had a difficult time finding good training material for getting started. There is a lot of available support material when running into issues, though, because of how many large companies use it.
Support is available and efficient. Response time is good and likelyhood of a quick resolutiion is high. However the mature solid product and proactive management tools, fortunately make support requirements relatively rare. The support for version upgrades is also strong, but again the basic upgrade process is usually straightforward and well documented.
This rating is related to setting up an environment from an existing Perforce repository. Initial setup of Perforce as the repository for the company was done by a separate team long prior to my inception.
Git is great, I love Git. But it's not great for dealing with binary assets, even when using Git LFS. Locking is not as simple as on perforce. Git presents some problems on using for non-tech people it can get overwhelming and tech people have to come by and help.
We used MIMIX for its role for iSeries high availability. We used Double Take by Vision Solutions for our production Windows environment. MIMIX is designed for iSeries, and Double Take was designed for Windows. We had VMware virtual environment, running multiple VMs for production ERP Lawson M3, now Infor. Both MIMIX and Double Take played the role well for what needed to be done. Without either MIMIX or DoubleTake, the business would have been impacted.
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.
MIMIX works to its intended functionality. It provides real time data replication across multiple partitions and systems as defined. I have never witnessed any problems with MIMIX in scaling to larger systems or adding new data groups. In conjunction with the inherent scalability of IBMi scalability and configuration flexibillity are rather quick and easy.
