ApexSQL Enforce

Introduction
Rules, guidelines, and standards are necessary! At least if you are involved in software development in one way or another. When you work in teams of more than one person, you almost certainly need to establish a set of rules in place in order to avoid some kind of disaster.  So what are some examples of a disaster that can manifest?

1. Think of a development team, where one developer uses a naming convention that allows blanks in object names, while other team members strictly avoid blanks.
2. Think about the test (or QA) team which is in charge of reviewing the code produced by the above mentioned development team. Think especially about the time wasted examining the code, getting back to the developers and have to modify the code, and thereafter starting all over again.
3. Think about a database engineering team without a configuration standard document in place.
4. Think about the same database engineering team that needs to review server configurations on a regular basis to ensure that each configuration complies to the defined standard.
5. Think about the poor engineer troubleshooting performance issues on a production server that arose due a non-standard configuration.
6. Last, but not least, in the light of the upcoming SQL Server 2008 release think about a database engineering team that plans to migrate to 2008 and is asked to make realistic estimates on potential issue with existing databases during the upgrade process.

ApexSQL Enforce
The purpose of this spotlight is to introduce you to a new tool by ApexSQL named Enforce which addresses the above mentioned disaster scenarios by enabling you to create your own set of rules pertaining to SQL Server development and/or administration and easily check existing databases and servers to see if they conform to these rules.

Installation, System Requirements, supported SQL Server versions
You can download a fully functional 30-day trial version of ApexSQL Enforce from the ApexSQL website. The download file is just about 12 MB in size and contains just 1 file: the ApexSQLEnforce.exe.

The system requirements are as follows:
Software:

• Microsoft ActiveX Data Access Objects Library (ADO) (MDAC) 2.8 or greater.
• Microsoft SQL Server version 7 or later.
• Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 or later is required for all products.

CPU:

• PC at 450 MHz (or faster). Pentium III recommended

RAM:

• 256 MB RAM (512 RAM suggested)

Hard Disk Drive Space:

• 30MB

As you see from this table the system requirements are very moderate and therefore almost any serious developer PC today will be able to run the software.

ApexSQL Enforce supports all SQL Server versions starting with SQL Server 7.0 and already implements support for the upcoming SQL Server 2008 version. More on this topic in just in moment.