A First Look at SSW SQL Auditor

Maintaining quality and standards are very difficult in large teams. This becomes even more difficult when teams are spanned over different geographical regions, which is the current trend in the IT world.

SSW SQL Auditor allows developers to check their database design against common SQL Server design rules, and report on the elements that do not conform to those rules. SSW SQL Auditor not only reports on design issues and areas where SQL performance could be improved, it also has wizards that generate SQL scripts to correct common problems.

SSW SQL Auditor helps to prevent the bad practices of team members and can lead to increased efficiency of the software development process.

Version and Configuration

This review has done using the following software and hardware configuration:

• Operating System: Windows 2000 Advance Server Service Pack 4

• SQL Server: Version 2000 Service Pack 3

• SSW SQL Auditor: Version 9.62

• Processor: Intel® Pentium ® CPU 2.80 GHz

• Memory: 512 MB

• .NET Framework v1.1

Product Overview

This SSW SQL Auditor is wizard-driven, which eases the usability of the tool.

To begin using the tool, the your initial step is to choose a data source for the database which you desire to analyze. You can either enter a connection string, or build the connection string by clicking the Build button. In addition, you can specify the time out values as well.

After gathering the schema information of the selected data source, the next step is to select a task. Tasks are categorized into two areas: SQL Auditor and Rules. These include a series of wizards, some of which are described below.

• The Database optimization wizard guides you through the steps necessary to generate a database optimization report. The report lists areas where performance can be improved.
   

• The Relationships wizard guides you through a script generation process which you can use to create relationships on a database, like Cascade Update Relationships.
   

• The Primary Key wizard guides you through a script generation process that can be used to create a primary key on a table.
   

• The Clustered Index wizard guides you through a script generation process to create a clustered index on a table.
   

• The Timestamp wizard guides you through a script generation process to create a timestamp column on a table.
   

• The Validate Foreign key columns wizard guides you through a script generation process to create a relationship on columns which end in “ID” and do not have foreign key constraint.

Under the rules, you can view the different standards which have defined at the SSW website. All the rules are predefined. As one example, SQL Server Object Naming Standard rules they have defined in following way.