Sometimes Your customer just has that bloody hosting with IIS and MSSQL database instead of good old Apache+MySQL. I used to use SqlBuddy on Windows, but after switching to Linux I had hard time finding a nice GUI frontend to MSSQL (SqlBuddy fails to work under Wine).

Along came JDBC 🙂

There’s a really nice universal JDBC GUI frontend called SquirrelSQL. Just download and java -jar installer.jar and select MSSQL plugin. Then download jTDS driver and unzip the JAR somewhere. Run Squirrel SQL using its .sh script and double click „Microsoft MSSQL Server JDBC driver”. Add jtds-v.e.r.jar to Extra Class Path and change Class Name to net.sourceforge.jtds.jdbc.Driver and Example URL to jdbc:jtds:sqlserver://<server_name>.

Then create new alias, test and… voila! 🙂