dbForge Actually Makes SQL Fun
What do you like best?
First of all, dbForge ships with a dark theme. That's huge already, but the features I absolutely love are:
Powerful and intuitive SQL formatting and code completion - I don't need to go searching for column names as dbForge suggests and can even insert them automatically.
The table designer and database diagrams are nice, though not necessarily unique among products. They still help me visualize and understand the database.
The killer feature for me is the ability to compare my database with another database and generate a highly customizable change script to get the other database's schema to match my own. This lets me just make changes to one database, then script them out and have the tool worry about the differences.
What do you dislike?
Honestly, the main thing I dislike right now is my own lack of knowledge of all of dbForge's features. I don't have time to go through all the tutorials and documentation devart offers, so it's just a time limitation on my part in exploring all the ways that dbForge can help me.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
There's a tendency to try to stay inside of SSMS as a SQL Server developer. This is acceptable, and if you're really set on that, devart offers a dedicated add-in to SQL Server that will help you out, but it's okay to go outside of the normal set of tools and dbForge really can do what you need it to do.
What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?
I'm not amazing with SQL, and I view a lot of database development as repetitive and tedious. The formatting, code insertion, code completion, and script generation fix ALL of these problems and let me focus on actually building out my new database.
