Introducing SQL Farm Combine

Some of you may remember at the end of last year I said I would be keeping my eye on a company called SQL Farms. Today I have my first update on their progress. They've got an editor that has tons of very rich functionality, but one of my favorites is the server grouping. What it does is allow you to group servers and/or databases together and then simultaneously run queries against them as a group. So you could

Some of you may remember at the end of last year I said I would be keeping my eye on a company called SQL Farms. Today I have my first update on their progress.

They've got an editor that has tons of very rich functionality, but one of my favorites is the server grouping. What it does is allow you to group servers and/or databases together and then simultaneously run queries against them as a group. So you could pull back job info on all of your production servers at once with a single query. The results pane even aggregates the results for you. There are many other features you'll find useful, but rather than spin a bunch of cycles on explaining it to you myself, I'll just relay to you what they sent me.

If anyone has any questions on the product feel free to write me and if I don't know the answer, I'll get you a contact at SQLFarms who does. Anyway, here's the feature list in their own words.

SQL Farm Combine™ is a code deployment and change management tool, built into a rich-feature integrated development environment (IDE). The main advantage of SQL Farm Combine™ is that it allows enterprises to automate and build processes around the Dev <=> QA <=> Production lifecycle of SQL code releases, where the three environments are either connected or disconnected (disconnected environments reflects the fact that developers do not have access to the QA or production servers, and software engineers in QA do not have access to the Production machines). Another key benefit of SQL Farm Combine™ is that it supports SQL code deployment (queries, scripts) onto any number of databases and servers in parallel (patent-pending technology), therefore Combine is extremely useful for deploying code and/or running queries on multiple databases and servers at the same time in small to very-large SQL server environments. As an example, SQL Farm Combine™ Beta participants included companies with anywhere from 5 to 270 SQL servers.

Novel features of SQL Farm Combine:

Change management and deployment

1. Code packaging: SQL Farm Combine™ allows developers to collaborate and work together on their SQL releases. Once the SQL code is composed, developers then build a single code package for their release, which contains SQL scripts and maps each script to a set of target databases, on any number of servers.