Free SQL

Prompt 2.0 valuable, but flawed; 

V3.0

being built from scratch the Red Gate way

I’ve been reading the interesting forum discussion on SQL

Server Central about the free version of SQL Prompt made available by Red Gate

in May. Steve Jones very kindly invited me to clear up any misunderstandings in an open

letter to the community.

When we acquired SQL Prompt we knew that it was a popular

piece of software – clearly it had great potential. It’s always seemed unfair

that SQL Server professionals were the only ones denied the benefits of

Intellisense. But, despite its potential and popularity, SQL Prompt was very

early in its life and contained a number of significant problems.

Our original plan was to sell the tool shortly after buying

it, but after spending more than a month with some of our best people working

on it, there were still a lot of problems – many of which stemmed from the

fundamental design of the software. Technically, the right thing to do was to

start again. But while all this was happening, we’d been telling people that

SQL Prompt would be available soon. We faced two choices: Remove the tool from

circulation and disappoint those for whom SQL Prompt was already a massive

productivity enhancer, or provide the tool and risk damaging our brand by

selling something that had quality and design problems.

After some heated discussions, we decided to distribute the

product, but didn’t feel that we could charge for it because of the quality

issues. SQL Prompt 2.0 is a completely free product that has no time bombs or

other restrictions. This was controversial inside Red Gate because we were in

danger of damaging our good reputation for quality.  But in the end, we thought

this was the right thing to do for the SQL Server community.

I take blame for the fact that we failed to amend the

licensing agreement for SQL Prompt, which mistakenly implies that it’s a

paid-for product. This was a blooper. Just to reiterate, v2 is free and always

will be, but we will stop distributing it when v3 releases in September. Right

now, focusing our testing and development engineers on producing a really

robust and feature-rich new tool, rather than hacking around with the old one,

is the right thing to do.

Our team (which includes Bart Read, our development lead) is

confident of delivering a really excellent new tool, SQL Prompt 3, at the end

of September. The full list price will be $195, but between now and the release

date we’re offering pre-orders at $99.  

We believe SQL Prompt 3 is going to hit the spot. Providing

fast, accurate, flexible Intellisense that works seamlessly even with very

large SQL Server databases is a challenge, but it’s just the sort of challenge

we like to meet.

All the best,

Simon Galbraith

Joint-CEO, Red Gate Software

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