What have you been working on?
We have been working on fixing bugs and known issues in ApexSQL Generate as well as improving the tool’s usability and general quality. We have also been adding lots of new features like Dependency checker, which enables previewing the existing relationships for the selected table along with the option to include/exclude the dependent tables.
What is the ETA to production?
ApexSQL Generate 2016 was released on 23rd October.
What is included in the new release?
ApexSQL Generate 2016 introduces a lot of new features and it comes with support for SQL Server 2016 CTP2.
- SQL Server 2016 CTP2 support
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Dependency checker provides a way to preview the dependent tables (parent and child) and to include/exclude them from the generation
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SQL Server Management Studio integration enables starting the data generation directly from SQL Server Management Studio
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Cross-column data generation enables creating test data based on generated values from another column with included predefined functions for data customization. This means that any column can have values generated as the result of the equation which uses columns as variables
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Post generation summary showing the progress, possible errors, the number of rows successfully inserted into the database and the time span of the generation process
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GUI warning notifications in tree view and preview panel, including warnings for incorrect generator settings, circular dependencies, constraint violations, info messages regarding DELETE triggers enforced for the selected column and more
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Custom user-defined generators – an existing generator with custom settings, named and saved for later usage. It can also be saved in a shared directory, thus making it available for others to use
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Full Command Line Interface support providing more flexibility and automation of the data generation process
- 120+ meaningful predefined data generators like country names, world capitals, US cities, book titles, male and female names, social security numbers, email addresses etc. Predefined generators provide more complex, “real world” data
- Importing data from SQL view is an enhancement of the “import data from SQL table” functionality which allows mapping and transferring existing data from an SQL view, thus preserving the state and values as they are in the database
- Data generation by setting the execution time or by setting the percentage of other table’s row count
What is planned in future releases and what are ETAs?
By the end of year, we are planning to have one more release of ApexSQL Generate. This version will include new features like exporting to JSON and Excel, manual foreign key generator and dependency viewer – visual representation of database object dependencies.
October 29, 2015
