First of all, the product has far more features than discussed in the article. For instance, it can create from a query a standalone client viewer executable that can be emailed to someone as a quick report.

Another feature: you can double-click on a value in a column of the query results and lookup this value in another table you will select from the popup prompt.

There are tons of other features as well. What's bad, however, is that little of them work satisfactory. On overall, the product would be good as beta, but in my opinion, it's quality is far from the release.

It's slow. Thing as trivial as opening new query window takes 20 seconds or so on 2GHz/1GB machine.

Every now and then, it bombs out. Must save your work every 5 minutes.

Visual Query fails to parse anything non-trivial. Worse yet, after such failure, it erases the query completely. Say, you work on a query, then you add more to it, then you try to switch to the visual mode - oops, already can't do that, bad luck, your query text is now gone.

By the way, speaking of the article - indeed, there's no query diagram in Query Analyzer; but there's one in Enterprise Manager, and, unlike Apex, it does not take one minute to initialize.

The above are just few examples; in fact, working with this product, I hit things like those every 5 minutes - things that are maybe OK in alpha or beta, but that should not be happening in released products.

From experience of working with this product for several weeks, I came to the conclusion that it's an interesting and impressive toy to play with, but it's definitely not a tool that might be reliably used by a developer in "production mode".