The Alagad crew (well my team at least) is happily working with a client to help them create a next-generation product data management system. This is easily the largest and most complex system I’ve ever worked on. Yesterday I was breaking ground on the next and final major section of the application. I spent the previous days coming up with use cases, etc, and planning my approach to the architecture for this section. As a part of that I defined a set of SQL tables and I spent yesterday actually creating the tables. I tend to create tables in my local database and, once they’re finalized, I email scripts to our DBA who adds them to the “gold” copy of the database which is deployed to our client’s servers.
So, today, I’m working through some high-level code and I realize I need the latest copy of the database. So I grab the latest revision out of SVN and restore it over my local copy. (Anyone see where this is headed?) And get back to work. This is when I start getting weird errors about objects not existing. D’oh! I’d restored over my changes without first generating my scripts! The first thing I do is look for my SQL backups. (Yes, I run SQL backups of development databases.) But, for some unknown reason it seems like my SQL Agent has been shut off since August! So, needless to say, I had no backups of the database. So, after complaining to a co-worker and enabling SQL Agent, I was about to get back into recreating tables when I realized a couple things:
- SQL Server is running in VMWare.
- I’m on a Mac using Time Machine so I should be able to restore yesterday’s backup of the VM.
- I don’t need to restore yesterday’s backup! I have automatic snapshots enabled in VMWare!
To solve my dilemma all I had to was create a snapshop of the VM’s current state, roll back to the last snapshot, generate my scripts, roll forward and apply my scripts. Problem solved! I really love VMWare!
DougHughes.net 
Comments on: "I Just Love VMWare" (3)
VMWare Fusion is the perfect way to run Windows, and having multiple instances of Windows for different needs really makes life easy. I could go on…
I sound like a commercial…they should pay me.
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One of the variety of reasons why I love the fact that DataFaucet generates database tables from CFC metadata or XML. Assuming that I’m using that feature (which I usually do), then I’d never be in the situation of not having a copy of the scripts for a table or collection of tables due to restoring a DB backup, because all the info is inherent in the CFC sitting in my SVN repository.
http://datafaucet.riaforge.org/blog/index.cfm/2008/10/14/BestOfBothWorlds
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Other than the snapshots, VMware is far more performant, uses way less memory, has a much wider variety of free appliances to be downloaded, has a free McAfee install for Windows installations, and MUCH better host-OS integration than Parallels.
Oh yeah, VMware also supports 3D acceleration as well.
Yeah, VMware FTW.
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