SQL Server Product Review #3 - DB Copy Tool

About a year or so ago, SQL Server Magazine (SQLMag.com) came out with a list of free downloads for SQL Server [1]; it included both free as well as trial downloads, all of which were neat third party add-ins for SQL Server.  I thought it would be cool to review a bunch of them to see which ones might be really great to have in my toolbox, so I'm going to start a little blog series on them.  SQL Mag listed them, but really didn't talk much about them other than a brief little blurb on what they did. I'll take this a step further than SQLMag by looking into them a little more in depth, and actually download and explore functionality. I hope that you find this an interesting series.

At random, I picked another tool from the list of free downloads, and came up with DB Copy Tool.  I can't think of how many times I wanted to take AdventureWorks and move it to a newly created instance of SQL Server, or take some database and copy it somewhere else for testing purposes.  So I thought that it might be fun to explore this tool.  I downloaded it from http://dbcopytool.codeplex.com/ and began geeking with it.

First off, I'm on an AD domain here at my house, fully equipped Windows Server 2008 R2 VMs hosted by one server-class box, and two other boxes that are mostly workstation class running the same o/s. My workstation is a Dell 390 running Windows 7, and I only have the SQL tools loaded on it - no local instance of SQL Serve running here.  When I download this from Codeplex, I find that an executable comes in a zip file format; I thought that it might have been cool to come with an installer or msi, but no biggie I can live with the exee.  Probably would take about five minutes to make a little installer for it.  Anyway, firing it up, you'll notice that it comes with a nice little GUI defaulted to the "Copy Database" tab.  You can see it in the below screenshot:

This is great, but unfortunately you really can't use this page until you use the second tab, so I sort of wondered why this was the default.  Here is the second tab (Servers) and I have registered two servers. Note that when you come to this page you have to go to the bottom and click the "Add server" button, which I sort of had to fish for because I immediately looked to the top of the form for this:

Here's what it looks like if I wanted to add another server:

I then checked "use integrated security", tested it via "Test it", received a friendly connection OK and then moved on:

Next you specify the directories for backup, data, and Log (which I did) by hitting the ubiquitous and popular "get it" button.  Nice!  I saved my server settings and then traversed back to the first page to copy a database.  One caveat - you have to have the database already built on the destination server, or you get this. Here I haven't created my "xxx" database yet, so it punts and you get the following error:

Creating a copy, I get the following with the nice little progress bars at it goes through the backup, copy, and restore processes:

I had one slight issue while using the product - it gave me this message when it finished the restore.  I need to investigate this more because I didn't fill in the path's format and am not sure what the problem is. If anyone else got this, please ping me.  Sure enough, the backup was not deleted.

In summary, this tool is handy.  I'm not sure how it would work with a large database or in some production setting, but for what I am using it for it's pretty nice.  Download a copy and see if it helps you out, and let me know what you think.  Bottom line - I like it and think they did a really good job!

Thanks for reading,

Lee

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Refs

http://dbcopytool.codeplex.com/

[1] Keller, Megan (2009). Mega Guide to FREE SQL Server Tools. SQL Server Magazine. Penton:August, 2009

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