Product Reviews

One of the less well-publicised offerings from Microsoft is the Microsoft SQL Server Desktop Engine (MSDE). This is a free cut-down version of SQL Server and is designed for use by a few people - in a single department of a company, for example. You can do quite a lot with MSDE, although there are inevitable restrictions. For many people the biggest drawback is that it doesn't come with any software to help you manage it and the databases within it. No user interface or administrative tools are supplied, which means that you have to use code from the start.

To overcome this problem, a range of third-party software developers have come up with more friendly ways of working with MSDE, and MSDE Manager from Vale Software is just such a product. It works with either MSDE 1.0 or MSDE 2000, and provides a workable administrative interface. Using MSDE Manager you can create and edit database objects, view and edit your data, back up and restore databases, configure security settings,

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run Transact SQL scripts and schedule regular jobs and backups. There's a help system to get you started.

MSDE Manager looks similar to the full SQL Server administration interface, and the editors within it work well. You can create and edit databases and objects within them, including Databases, Tables, Views, Users, Roles, Rules, Stored Procedures, Defaults, User Defined Datatypes and Functions. There's a table designer so you can add, edit and delete columns. You can specify settings such as the primary keys, triggers, indexes and constraints. There's a stored procedure editor where you can type your SQL code, with the elements colour-coded so you can see what you're doing.

MSDE Manager provides a backup and restore utility. You can back up a database to another area of the server, to a remote server or to a backup device. You can choose to back up the entire database, the transaction log or just the differences from the last time the database was backed up. There's an option to schedule the backup to happen automatically daily, weekly or monthly.

You can also take the database offline for maintenance. MSDE Manager can rebuild indexes, shrink a database to reclaim unused space and create checkpoints. The other elements of MSDE Manager include a Transact SQL editor and a Data Transformation Services utility, though this allows you only to execute DTS packages, not to create or edit them.

MSDE Manager makes it easy to manage MSDE databases. You can try it free for seven days, but the full product is reasonably priced at $79 (around £44.