Tools

Remote Desktop Connection Manager

Pavel Pawlowski Tools , , , ,

If you are managing or monitoring a larger amount of servers, you can try Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection Manager. It’s a free tool and it’s size is only 789 kB. it does perfectly it’s job. You can group yours server, specify a default connection parameter for each group, and those override in sub groups and/or server level.

Remote Desktop Connection Manager

Once you connect to a sever, you can switch to another. If you select a group, you see a thumbnails of all the servers in the groups. it’s possible to set the thumbnail size and what more, the Remote Desktop Connection Manager allows live updates of the thumbnails, and you can manage the server even through the thumbnail as it’s really live.

This tool can very simplify your life of administrator as you see all the servers in one place, and you do not need to remember all the servers or need to save .rdp files for each server in some folder. You have a complete overview of your machines.

Server Properties in Remote Desktop Connection ManagerMain Options of Remote Desktop Connection Manager

The Remote Desktop Connection Manager is supported on Windows 7, Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Vista. If you are using Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 you have to update to version 6 of Remote Desktop Connection client.

You can download it freely from Microsoft Download Center.

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SQL Script Manager by RedGate

Pavel Pawlowski SQL Server, Tools , , , ,

On December 16. 2010 RedGate released a free tool for DBAs for managing and and running T-SQL or IronPython scripts. You can download the script manager directly from RedGate SQL Script Manager site.

SQL Script Manager

The script manager allows you to manage collects scripts, and simplify their execution using Presets. Scripts are organized by Tags and Authors.

Script manager comes pre-bundled with 25 administration scripts and other scripts can be downloaded from SqlCentral.com scripts repository.

User can even create it’s own scripts. The scripts are encapsulated inside the .rgtool file, which is an XML file which structure is described on the RedGate support pages for the SQL Script Manager.

However it is interesting tool for collecting and managing scripts, I think, it brings nothing special what cannot be handled by the Templates and Templates Manager integrated in Management Studio (if talking about T-SQL Scripts). What more, SQL Management Studio Denali brings a new Code Snippets known from C# and VB .NET development in Visual Studio, which brings another power to the SSMS and from my point of view, writing the .rgtool is more complicated than writing a T-SQL template. On the other site it could be a useful tool for beginners DBAs.