DBArtisan vs. dbForge Studio (Edge)

DBArtisan is excellent for large institutions with multiple mission-critical databases. It works especially well for cross-platforms RDBMS support. I am mostly familiar with Oracle, but less familiar with SQL Server and Sybase. So I certainly appreciate having a similar interface that allows me to manage those less familiar RDBMS, as this will mean a smaller learning curve. DBArtisan is mostly for DBAs, it is not suitable for developers, I believe the vendor has a separate tool for that

Incentivized

Whenever a user or DBA wants to compare schematics between two environments, dbForge is extremely helpful. This is useful during version or framework upgrades, a database upgrade, patch implementations, service package implementations, or any time to environments would be different. The time it would take to write and execute queries, and then compare is exponentially longer than it takes with dbForge, where this is done and you have an application that allows you to quickly identify incongruities.

Incentivized

• The free trial offer was great for me to test the software before purchasing it.
• It monitors queries well and shows resource allocation, as well as detailed stats for each running query.

Incentivized

• Compare entire or subset of MySQL tables between databases
• Configure comparison rules
• Sync data between compared databases depending on differences
• Save comparison rules for reuse and sharing
• Break down differences between missing/new records, or different records
• See differences highlighted per field
• Execute sync immediately, or save as an SQL script file
• Command-line tool that can be used to add comparisons to deploy scripts

Incentivized

• DBArtisan lacks a utility that does schema or object comparisons, which is a feature in Toad. I find this useful in some situations where I need to find out all differences between Prod and QA for a given schema, for example. DBArtisan doesn't seem to have the capacity to do this.
• I wish there was a way for the tool to warn me before performing a long-running task. For example if I want to re-organize a large table or rebuild an index for a table with millions of rows, it should warn me before executing it, so that I may choose to do it in a different way. Sometimes if I let these long operations run for too long, it freezes the program and crashes DBArtisan. I would rather run it on the DB server, and run it in background so that it doesn't time out, if DBArtisan gave me a warning before execution.
• Idera has taken over Embarcadero. I never heard of or dealt with Idera for support. I don't know if they have same the quality support as before.

Incentivized

• [The] installation error I've already reported (ABARTN).xml [could use some improvement]. This has to do with Windows Defender (the default Windows anti-virus) not allowing the installation on the default installation directory of dbForge Studio [for SQL Server], thus the error. [With] the workaround, [I] was to disable the anti-virus for the duration of the installation, then turn it back on when the installation [was] been completed.
• [I would like to see] better defined licensing models for larger teams (seated vs. name licenses).

I have never tried their support so the number above is meaningless

Incentivized

Although experience here is limited, as only one question has been asked and answered promptly, the registration and licensing process was very smooth and professional. There are forums online that discuss dbForge issues, as well as a Facts and Questions section on dbForge's website, so product support does seem to exist if needed.

Incentivized

DBArtisan does not have an in-depth performance analyzer for databases.

Incentivized

I would say that dbForge equals or beats most of the abilities of the other tools I evaluated at the time. dbForge had better support (Devart), and regular feature updates. dbForge has better tools for data comparison and import/export. The price tag is slightly higher, but renewals rates are pretty good. It's a quality tool that still is well worth the cost.

Incentivized

• While it is expensive, it saves us a great deal of time in getting a lot of DB work done.
• The front end is reasonably powerful and significantly more polished than any of the free alternatives

Incentivized

• We perform better and faster syncing analysis between databases.
• We update running mysql databases faster and more efficiently.
• Especially with MySQL Workbench we had immense irritations due to all the crashes during the day. With dbForge Studio we finally had a power tool which is stable and does not crash constantly.

Incentivized