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! 🙂