Often when you create a calender entry everything goes the way you planned. But sometimes the event ends up on the wrong date. If you don’t happen to remember exactly the erroneous date you entered you have no way to find it again.

Alas – let the calendar have a way to show the last entries so you can find it there.

I am a developer and I most often use Sqlserver. The most common tool for working with Sqlserver is Sqlserver management studio and it does it’s job; which happens to be everything. Why not create a (relational) database tool targeted towards developers?

Things I normally don’t do

Now, as a developer I normally touch security at the beginning or end of a project. I usual handle just one of a couple of databases (database in sqlserver lingua, I believe it is called schema in Oracle) at a time. Space allocation is only used when doing backup and restore to create new or roll back a database. I have, unfortunately, never touched anything like sharding, replication, availability or other beardy stuff.

Things I normally do

I write queries, lots of queries. Depending on project I write stored procedures and triggers. I have also dealt with having DLLs inside Sqlserver. I do a lot of comparing schema and data with other databases.

What I want

I have a need for an IDE that leaves out all stuff I don’t or seldom use; whenever I need to dabble with security I can fire up Sqlserver management studio.

• awesome intelligence/typeahead/whateveryoucallit in the query editor. Management studios intellisense has become better but I still lack functionality I get with Sqlprompt by Redgate.  There are semi graphical tools for aiding query writing but I haven’t taken a serious stab at using them; I should.
• relations should be visible. When I work with a table I’d like to have indices, triggers and stored procedures in close vicinity, not through an “object explorer” tool window and a deep drill down tree. Say you are writing “select * from User” or selecting the User table in a list somewhere. Why not have a window, toolbar or menu automatically populate with depending tables, triggers and stored procedures?
• drill down possibility. Way to often I write a query and another and another just to find out where data comes from or vice verse. Without spending any time thinking and designing I am visualizing that when a row, say of a User, is found, one can with a click or key stroke get all Roles related to said User through the UserRoles table. Another example is User-> Order-> OrderItem-> Currency-> Country-> Company-> User.
• copy/paste update of table data. I also would like conversion of such copy or paste to a query to run on another instance.

What I want stuff that is really nice-to-have

• global search. I sometimes find a guid or a part of a string that has fled its sanctuary and need to find where in the database it originates. Somewhere I have a stored procedure for this but I’d like to have it built in to the tool and with more intelligence like searching for guids in proper fields and asking before doing a free text search in a million rows table.
• fast backup and restore. To take a temporary backup before doing a big or dangerous change. Then to restore said backup with ease. The Management studio dialogue for this is big, hard to use and error prone. By and by I need to create a copy of a database, say for branching a project, and that can too be made to be done with ease.
• no install. I manipulate data in production and don’t want to have to install anything; an xcopy should be enough.

I am getting tired of opening favourite editor and navigating to the folder for the hosts file to check it. (as a devops i do this a lot)

Why not have an application that does this and only this? For Windows it should also be easy to restart it as admin to update the hosts file.

Investigating the event log in Windows is fiddly to say the least.  The list takes a lot of space but doesn’t show much.  It takes a while to load in Windows 7.  The contents of each event can only be seen after opening the event and only one at a time in WinXP and with too much wasted space in Win7.

If one exported the event log to a queryable database, an ISAM would suffice, it would be a breeze to search and list.  It shouldn’t be too hard to write such a program.  Either export when a button is pressed or set it to subscribe to event log events.

Then create a better viewer too.