The polls have closed! Here are your—and our—favorite products of the year
SQL Server Magazine's annual Editors' Best and Community Choice award programs offer a unique way to recognize the hottest products among the past year's offerings. Choosing favorites from such a competitive field—not to mention in the midst of such a financially unstable market—can be a challenge, but this year's winners show an uncommon breadth of functionality and originality.
Our Editors' Best program highlights products that SQL Server Magazine editors and contributors believe are worthy of recognition, whereas our Community Choice program lets our readers decide which products are the best. As we did last year—rather than presenting a predefined list of products and services that limited your selection to our choices—we opened up the Community Choice nomination process to all. We let you nominate your favorite products and services, built the voting survey from there, and let everyone participate in the final voting phase. For the Gold winners of both Editors' Best and Community Choice, we even reached out to readers and spoke to them about how the product or service helps them do their job. We spoke to real users about real experiences, and we hope these testimonials benefit you in your environment.
In these pages, you'll find our Gold, Silver, and Bronze Editors' Best winners in each category directly adjacent to our Community Choice winners. Sometimes our editors and readers have agreed on favorite products and services in a given category, but more often they haven't. Do you agree with the choices our editors have made? Or do the picks that our readers have made carry more weight? Let us know! Regardless of whether these winners were chosen by editors or readers, you can be sure that all these products are worthy serious consideration if you're in the market for a new tool.
Best Backup and Recovery Software Product
Editors' Best
Gold: LiteSpeed for SQL Server 6.0 • Quest Software • www.quest.com
Silver: SQL safe backup 6.4 • Idera • www.idera.com
Bronze: Replay for SQL 4 • AppAssure • www.appassure.com
Why It Won: LiteSpeed for SQL Server sets a high bar for SQL Server backup products because it not only backs up SQL Server files quickly but also offers compression, encryption, and fast restores.
Chris Burns, director and database consultant for Data Technology Consultants, said “It works exactly the same as SQL Server, but with basically a more powerful engine. The high-speed, high-powered LiteSpeed engine backs up the way native backups would, but it’s honestly far faster and with compression to boot.” He said the main benefit his team sees in LiteSpeed for SQL Server 6.0 is its Fast Compression backup technology. “We gain a substantial compression ratio of about 75 to 80 percent of our physical standard SQL Server data files. The benefits of that aren't just in storage size—which relates to the cost per gigabyte—but also in restore speed, the obvious ability to restore more quickly, and also the ability to back up more quickly, which offloads the backup process from SQL Server as quickly as possible.”
Community Choice
Gold: SQL Backup Pro 6.4 • Red Gate Software • www.red-gate.com
Silver: SQL safe backup 6.4 • Idera • www.idera.com
Bronze: LiteSpeed for SQL Server 6.0 • Quest Software • www.quest.com
"SQL Backup Pro 6.4 compresses and encrypts SQL Server backups, and it has extra features to strengthen backup activities, including network resilience for backups and an intuitive interface for powerful job management."
Other hot vote-getters in this year's survey …
- Red Gate Software's SQL HyperBac
- OfficeRecovery.com's Recovery for SQL Server
