I received Friend of Red Gate gift several weeks ago. It’s a very good package, contained of T-Shirt, mug, USB drive, and pen handler. Red Gate treated community building seriously. As a one of the major player of SQL Server and .Net toolkit, the importance of community building is make sense. Community leader spread a good word about the product and helps increase revenue in the long term

Another advantage of becoming Friend of Red Gate is get the free copy of all Red Gate tools. Of course only for non commercial purpose. I really love SQL Compare, save me a lot of time when doing deployment and testing between development machine and production server. It compares all of the database structures and schema, and I can choose to merge or override between those databases. Also, SQL Data Compare is able to compare the database content, examine the differences, and decide to merge or override. It’s really eliminate my headache during development and maintenance.

Another tool like SQL Log rescue is also available for free. This tool allow us to restore back any changes that we have made, even when you want to restore any single rows . Of course we already have transaction log backup in SQL Server. But log backup only can do restore to specified point of time, or on specified mark. We can not restore only a single row instead of restore the whole log backup. That’s why 3rd party tools like SQL Log Rescue or Lumigent Log Explorer come in to the picture.

How do you became a Friend of Red Gate? If you have any publications like a blog, articles, web site, or manage a user group, than you’re eligible for apply. The bottom line is, if you are a community influential, than simply drop them a mail. A friend of mine Dondy is also a Friend of Red Gate .