SQL, Windows general

Introducing SQLDocKit – the SQL documentation tool

Frane Borozan - July 12, 2016

It has been five years since we released SPDocKit. Our initial idea was to create a simple documentation tool for SharePoint admins. Since then, we have made a great deal of progress. We have improved and upgraded so many aspects of our tool, and on so many levels, that we now offer something we like to call an ultimate SharePoint admin toolkit.

Our product has since become extremely popular and has been acknowledged by thousands of SharePoint administrators worldwide. Stemming from this positive response, we thought about how we could offer the same benefits to SQL administrators. That’s how SPDocKit’s baby brother, SQLDocKit (the SQL documentation tool), was born!

Welcoming SQLDocKit (SQL documentation tool) into the Acceleratio family!

Over the course of the last decade, Microsoft SQL Server has grown to be one of the most reliable enterprise databases. However, we have also found that many clients struggle to control the number of SQL instances they have running in the organization. This is a problem particularly with the free editions, such as SQL Server Express and SQL Server Developer. Without proper control mechanisms, hundreds of SQL Databases could be spinning in your organization, taking your precious CPU and Memory resources. In organizations, that have large development and test departments, many TBs of disk space may be blocked by development and test databases that are no longer in use.

So now what?

Autodiscovery to the rescue!

Let’s be honest, no matter through your documentation, there might be an SQL Server here and there that you don’t even know about. One of the key features of SQLDocKit is its ability to scan your entire domain—all servers—in search of installed SQL. In a matter of minutes, you can easily find all SQL Servers and create a comprehensive inventory of all SQL Server settings, and databases.

Snapshots and Documentation

With SQLDockit, you don’t need to worry about keeping your SQL Server documentation up to date. You can schedule a snapshot of your environment to be generated on a scheduled basis, and then exported to DOCX or PDF format. Once created and stored, these snapshots can easily be compared with previous snapshots, or used to compare the different servers and their settings.

Reports

We have devoted a lot of attention to the reports about servers and databases. We wanted to help SQL sysadmins to better understand the growth of their databases, and to get a clearer picture of the disk space used by log files. SQLDocKit can also send alerts if disk space is about to run out on any particular server.

Organizations with loads of DEV and TEST databases will find our reports especially useful. SQLDocKit detects databases with orphaned owners, databases that haven’t been used in a while, and those that are not backed up on a regular basis.

Best Practices

We are delivering this version with a set of predefined SQL Best Practices, as well as health checks to ensure your database servers are properly configured according to the latest best practices. Best Practices are among the features that will be expanded in upcoming releases, so we encourage you to tell us which Best Practice checks you would like us to implement!

Ok, let’s get down to business:

As with all Acceleratio tools, we aim to make products affordable, and to align with your specific business needs.

For those managing on-premise SQL Server infrastructure, we offer licensing per Server (additional instances on the same box are free, and we don’t charge anything if you have Express or Developer editions) or per Site. If you are a consultant working to help customers document and optimize their infrastructure and to create a software inventory of all SQL Servers, we have an exclusive Consultant subscription just for you.