The new product of Altovo’s DatabaseSpy 2007 has been announced. This release mainly helps to manage large amounts of data, how to keep it secure, and ensure availability.

Altova's DatabaseSpy 2007 has got the benefit of lowering the learning curve for a lot of common database tasks so that employees can concentrate on their jobs. Although it lacks some administrative functionality that would be attractive to administrators, it still boasts of some features, such as IntelliSense code-completion.

The highlight of DatabaseSpy’s product’s capabilities is its editing features. There’s the IntelliSense code-completion feature that beats SQL Server Management Studio's hands down. IntelliSense not only fills in table names and other objects as you type, but it also gives you reserved words. Notably, the features work only for SQL Server, although DatabaseSpy works with all databases.

The IntelliSense gives you all of the DBCCs (database console commands), the internal procedures DataBase Administrators (DBAs) use to perform much of their administration functions such as re-indexing. This is pretty advanced functionality for what essentially equates to an end-user tool.

Another feature is the Favorites section in the tree view. By adding any objects in a project to your Favorites list, you no longer have to keep searching through hundreds of objects to find it; rather, you'll have easy access to it whenever you like. However, this is lacking in competitors' native tools. There is also a coding feature that has the ability to define named code regions, and to send query results to named result panes.

DatabaseSpy also has very useful import/export functionality. It allows you to import data quite easily from flat files and export it to a number of destinations, including CSV, XLS, HTML, XML, XML Structure, and directly to XMLSpy, the company's XML editing/modeling tool. DatabaseSpy also possess a graphical interface for designing tables.

Inspite of all the strengths, DatabaseSpy falls a bit short in terms of tools. Among other things, it lacks a debugger. So, it can't run execution plans, doesn't offer source control, and it won't let you work with stored procedures and functions directly from the database.

Despite its lack of admin-oriented features, Altova DatabaseSpy 2007 is priced reasonably compared with its competition. Its true power currently resides is in its ease of use for end-users and its import/export functionality. But bear in mind that this is only the first release; so be cautious with the tool.