Sequel Pro vs. SolarWinds SQL Sentry

• Super easy for quick development and investigation
• The interface of exporting tables to SQL can be made better, it's not easy to manually check
• Not suitable for designing your DB
• Connections over SSH to vagrant and Docker hosted DBs
• Auto suggestion can be better

Incentivized

Of all the tools I've used, SolarWinds SQL Sentry's Top Query has been the single most helpful tool in helping me identify which queries are putting a load on our servers and at what times. This greatly simplifies my job in prioritizing tuning. Having Plan Explorer directly linked to the tool is icing on the cake.

Incentivized

• Editing existing data. Editing record contents is trivial in Sequel Pro, while not nearly as easy in MySQL Workbench or phpMyAdmin.
• Deleting data - even simpler than editing data.
• Inserting new data - using "Duplicate row" then making needed changes is very simple.

Incentivized

• Alerting is very flexible and configurable to our needs
• Linking alerting into third party alerting tools via PowerShell was easy
• Collecting and rolling up SQL statements make it much easier to troubleshoot performance problems
• Drilling into PLE and what’s happening when it drops out
• Ease of drilling into time-frame to figure out what was the issue at that time
• Being able to query the SentryOne database for management reports is awesome (Deadlocks and Blocking)

• Improving the way we create new connections to remote databases
• I couldn't find any way to configure my local server (MySQL), so I need to make changes on server outside the application. I know that there are other tools that integrate it, so you don’t have to leave the workflow
• It could have a feature to integrate our databases or connections (favorites) with other devices, like using Google Drive or Dropbox. It would be really useful!

Incentivized

• It would be nice if the reports can be interactive like drill down, clickable content, etc.
• Navigation could improve and become more intuitive.
• Calendar of events could also improve - wish the date and time range could be specified instead of just by day or interval.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

It is easy to use, but the design could use updating as it's very dated.

Incentivized

I don't know how we survived before without this tool, the added value that you get from it to do deep dive performance analysis, reactive problem solving and proactive monitoring and alerting is limitless. We have only scratched the surface of what we can do with this tool at my company. The support and ROI that SentryOne provide is exceptional and one of my favourite vendors to deal with.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

It's open-source and very convenient to work with. I can easily import any database I want using a data dump and runt the queries on them to derive the data insights on the data. I might want to use Excel to visualize that, that might be one of the disadvantages.

Incentivized

The main platform is very well supported. Requests for help with customizing alerts and monitors have been rapidly and thoroughly responded to. Our use of the chain feature seems to be out of the ordinary and our defect reports there while understood and taken seriously, tend to be lower priority than defects in the main platform. They will work diligently to give us a workaround but correction in the standard release is a little slower in the chain feature.

Incentivized

sql sentry expert came onsight to review the performance of installation and gave us a good insight to using the tool

Incentivized

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).

Incentivized

MySQL workbench is good to work with MySQL databases, but Sequel Pro gives us the ability to work with any SQL databases. It's open-source, lightweight and solves the problem that I am required to solve to run the DDL and DML queries.

Incentivized

SQL Sentry has a LOT more information in it than the SolarWinds DPA product. Its reporting tool isn't as good either. The IDERA product isn't as reliable as SQL Sentry and its reporting isn't nearly as good. The IDERA UI is a resource hog and isn't as intuitive.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Unreliability has lead to wasted time and frustration among staff.
• The ease of testing database changes and modifying test data WHEN IT WORKS theoretically makes testing quick and easy but in reality, this is far outweighed by the wasted time and frustration involved with it not being reliable.
• The ease of seeing the relations between tables is very nice and saves time when trying to see how unfamiliar tables are connected.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized