ApexSQL Log 2005.10 released + API

The big news this week is that we have released ApexSQL Log 2005.10 together with ApexSQL Log API 2005.10. Yup, API is out there for all you people that have expressed interest for programmable transaction log reading API over the past couple of years. But let's start with ApexSQL Log.

There are three major enhancements in this release of ApexSQL Log:
1. Support for ApexSQL Log API. These two applications share the same server-side components right from the start so you can run them in parallel on the same server by design.
2. Improvements of UPDATE reconstruction process. Due to the way SQL Server logs UPDATE operation, their auditing is Achilles' heel when auditing with transaction logs. However, in this new version we have again improved this process managing to extract more data than ever. It still not infallible (and it will never be infallible unless SQL Server's way of logging UPDATE operations is changed) but it's *very* good indeed.
3. Support for online transaction log reading on Vista x64 and, much more importantly, on upcoming Windows Server 2008 (x64 and IA64 but more on that below)

Here are two enhancements that we didn't deem as major since they are experimental:
1. Experimental support for Itanium (IA64) platforms for SQL Server 2005 IA64 and SQL Server 2000 64-bit.
2. Experimental support for SQL Server 2008 on all platforms (x86, x64 and IA64.) This includes support for new data types (DATE, DATETIME2, DATETIMEOFFSET and TIME)

Yes, as you can see we can actually add support for Itanium and SQL Server 2008 and not call it a major feature simply because they are experimental. For comparison try finding another transaction log reading application that supports even SQL Server 2005 on x64.

What does "experimental support" means? It means that it works (and it all really does work) but that we don't support it officially which in turn means you get support *anyway* and as always we try to fix problems ASAP *anyway* but you understand that this support hasn't been as thoroughly tested as with our other platforms.

Now let's move to ApexSQL Log API. API exposes DML auditing features of ApexSQL Log. Everything ApexSQL Log has in this regard (reading of online/detached/backup transaction logs, filtering, old/new table ID mapping, etc.) is exposed in API and it works just like it does in ApexSQL Log. So what's missing? Missing are:
1. Recovery Wizard: if you need to recover from a data loss (deleted data without transaction log, truncated and dropped tables, corrupted MDF files) you will need to grab ApexSQL Log.
2. DDL auditing. In this initial version at least we are exposing only DML auditing.
3. Out-of-box exports into XML, CSV and so on. All these can be built by using API so we didn't include them. We are evaluating publishing export classes using API just to demo the technology.
4. Command Line Interface and GUI. You would need to build those but it can be done with API.

I'll post more soon on the way API is used. Regarding licensing and related stuff (like distribution) I would recommend that you consult here.

From now on I'll be writing a bit more hopefully (would I bet on it you say?! well... what odds are you giving me ;) There are several parallel projects that I'm involved with but that I can't discuss right now. Suffice to say that ApexSQL Log (and API) will be getting some pretty cool stuff in ApexSQL Log 2008 release and the same goes for some other products of ours (and one completely new one...)