“Recently we had a situation where we were developing an ETL incremental load process as well as as reporting. As a result we needed 2 copies of the source database (from different point in times) and 2 copies of the destination database (1 for the ETL testing and 1 for the report testing). As you can imagine we quickly ran out of disk space. SQL Virtual Database would have been a great use for those source databases which were larger and we were testing functionality only, not performance on the source."

“This is a great product! We have a situation where we keep backups of some of our databases for up to 12 months and there are cases where we do need to restore some of them. This product will make our work lot more easier."

“I find it very useful in my environment. We are a software devlopment company, and I have been using it for our developers. They are all able to use the same data base to test against, without me having to restore a backup everytime the software under test makes changes to the db or the db schema."

“I tried SQL virtual database and I liked it very much and I think it can be very handy if you need to query or recover a table."

“Idera's virtual database tool saves me hours of recovery time from testing out scripts prior to deploying them. If there's an error with a large script I no longer need to restore 700GB of databases. Instead I simply drop the database and then add it back in a minute as a virtual database and I'm able to get back to testing."

“Appears to be a nice way to view and compare data without impacting server space significantly."

“With this being the case I can see using this to find differences in data quicker than other backup and restore methods. This is shaping up to be a necessary tool for any DBA or Developer..."

“There are several good reasons to use it. One is restoring data to a table that has been munged up by a user, in some time frame. The other is training databases where they constantly have to be restored to an original state. It's very easy to have 2 copies on the servers, and just attach to the one you need to."

“It is quite useful tool for data recovery or running adhoc report against last night backup in test server."

“We are excited about the possibility of saving considerable disk space by not having to restore large databases just to retrieve a set of rows that were accidently and incorrectly updated. We also will be able to find which backup file contains the correct data without being required to restore multiple backup files. We are also excited about letting some of our users pull data from backup files into SAS for further analysis without having to create an entire reporting instance that is only used a few times a week for data dumps."

“I gave it a try and it worked very well. I attached a production full backup (200GB) in just 5 minutes!"

“Very useful, especially when we need to extract some data from a backup, we use it on extracting data from backups from 12 months to develop a data warehouse."

“I am looking forward to being able to recover yesterdays product info when the business finds something wrong with todays info. This has happened several times and the typical process is to restore yesterday's backup somewhere and extract the data. This process typically takes 2-3 hours... This product should cut that time drastically."

“We can validate backups very fast now and can also distribute the backup files to our developer-team who can then use SQL virtual database on their developer-machines to test various runs directly and even offline the network, without having to disturb the operations team to have a copy loaded on to the server."

“This product is the easiest and fastest way to check that your backups are valid and working without having to do a full restore on a test server. I was able to "re-create" a 40 Gb virtual database with approx. 20 transaction log backups from our production server. This gave me an up-to-date point in time "snapshot" of our live DB in a matter of minutes on our test server for our training and development users."

“This would be a convenient way for us to monitor issues and changes between system versions"

“Today, this tool performed magic for me. Had to restore a 400GB database for a bank and within 10 minutes I was able to get the required tables from backup."

“In my environment, I often have to access troubleshooting data in databases on servers I don't have a live connection to. Often, we get backups of these databases in house and the amount of time needed to restore locally can far exceed the amount of time I need to run queries. SQL virtual database allows me to attach the backup and extract the necessary information in a short amount of time.”

“We have around a dozen or so databases on one of our servers that are just read-only restores that we need for our annual audit. These databases at first took 420GB of storage. After alot of work eliminating .ldf files and moving away one database, they took up 370GB of space. Now, with SQL virtual database, I can run the reports off the FBAK files which take up only 71GB. I'm SOOOOO ecstatic. I went from having 191GB free and lots of issues with intermittently running out of space on drives to having 491GB free."

“SQL virtual database is a fantastic tool for checking backup and archive procedures and validating the data stored in the backups and archives. It is also a great tool for ad-hoc reporting on archived data. I was able to use SQL virtual database to run reports on an archived safety and security database to provide our Safety Officer with details of security incidents at our hospital without actually restoring the archived database file. I saved myself at least a half day of work and was able to provide reports much faster then I could without this tool. I also did not have to worry about coordinating resources with other DBAs or System Admins to run the reports. I am looking forward to using SQL virtual database in other ways to build a better business intelligence infrastructure for our hospital.”

“So nice. We are implementing a new ERP system and we are currently in a testing phase where a lot of the programming logic goes wrong. Now, we are able to roll the system back to the exact database state when the error occurred - in just a few minutes.”

“For a developer, this seems like a neat tool to understand whether a given problem was introduced recently, assuming backups are already available.”

“This would be a convenient way for us to monitor issues and changes between system versions."

“I was able to create a virtual database of a SharePoint backup file and let the SharePoint group recover a document in 10 minutes rather than 4 hours!”

“I was able to recover several SQL Server objects that were dropped in production without restoring and using 5x the disk space!! This is a big deal since several of the databases that I was working with have a 350+GB compressed backup file.”

“With SQL virtual database, I am now able to locate and recover deleted records from old backups in minutes!”

“With SQL virtual database, I can run historical reports off our backup files without taking up any disk space to restore them! Awesome!”

“With SQL virtual database, we no longer need to mess with log shipping to create an environment for reporting. Instead, we just attach our backups as virtual databases, and voilà – instant reporting!”

“We are able to quickly view and restore security settings from our virtual database”