In the previous three posts (1, 2, 3), I had talked about some of the good and bad experiences that I had experienced with the Ling to SQL Profiler. As it turns out, the end was pretty anti-climactic. It’s hard to give an overall impression of the tool suite based on that, but I’ll try.
You can’t use what doesn’t work
As I had mentioned before, there was a particularly annoying problem with my attempt to use the profiler. In essence, the profiler would simply stop profiling. The only workaround was to essentially rebuild the solution every time I wanted to set up a new profiler session, as well as doing an iisreset and recycling the relevant app pools.
This was painful but it worked. Until I sat down to start to optimize the pages I had prioritized.
One really annoying thing about UberProf is that it automatically tries to update itself when it launches to whatever the most recent version is. This is bad. The various dlls referenced in the project I was working with were of specific builds, which meant that every time a new build comes along, I have to delete and re-reference the updated dlls.
“Well, just choose the ‘no, I don’t want to update’ option when you launch the profiler.” That’s great, except it doesn’t work. It won’t try to update the profiler while you are using it for that session, but once you close the profiler, you get this:
You have to be quick enough to kill the download, otherwise, you lose your build version.
This is really bad. In just about any environment, you want to be able to control the version of the software you use, not be forced to upgrade. I understand from Ayende’s standpoint why he wants the user to be using the most recent version, but I don’t care what Ayende wants when it relates to my software.
That’s bad enough. But, what made it even worse was that the painful workaround no longer worked. The profiler, of whatever version I was using at the time, wouldn’t profile at all. It was simply unusable.
One way to get around the issue, otherwise known as the ‘whimper’
The inventory for the site that I was using the profiler for was sold, and the site was decommissioned. That certainly ‘solves’ the issue, since I no longer need to use it.
Next Test of UberProf, EFProf
However, I am working on something that will use EFProf. I don’t know if I will experience the same painful workaround situations. I hope not.
Current Judgement on UberProf : FAIL
It was nice that I was able to use the online forum to get Ayende to Skype into my machine. That’s good. After an hour of being unable to fix the issue and giving up, it really isn’t good enough.
To be fair, I didn’t press the issue after that. But I shouldn’t have to.
Combine that with the forced build version updates that you can’t block without manually killing a download, and I can’t say much other than that the tool is not only not enterprise ready, but generally unusable. I’m hoping the EFProf experience is better.
Do you think this at all encourages the use of RavenDB?