Red Gate Software is a software company based in Cambridge

Cambridge

The city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...

, UK. It primarily provides tools for database developers and administrators. In addition, through its Simple Talk Publishing subsidiary, it maintains community websites such as SQL Server Central and Simple Talk. Since 2007 it has featured in the Sunday Times '100 Best Companies to Work For'

The Sunday Times 100 Best Companies to Work For

Since 2001, the Sunday Times newspaper has published annual lists of the best companies to work for in the UK. The award is highly valued by its winners.The list ranks Britain's best companies to work for based a number of criteria...

 in the United Kingdom .

The company was founded by Neil Davidson and Simon Galbraith in October 1999. The company is named after Via Porta Rossa (Red Gate Street) in Florence

Florence

Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....

, Italy, close to where Neil Davidson used to live.

On 20 August 2008, Red Gate announced they were taking responsibility for future development of the free tool .NET Reflector

.NET Reflector

.NET Reflector is a proprietary software utility for Microsoft .NET combining class browsing, static analysis and decompilation, originally written by Lutz Roeder. MSDN Magazine named it as one of the Ten Must-Have utilities for developers, and Scott Hanselman listed it as part of his "Big Ten...

.

Products

Red Gate produces and sells various software tools, targeted primarily at developers and administrators who use Microsoft SQL Server

Microsoft SQL Server

Microsoft SQL Server is a relational database server, developed by Microsoft: It is a software product whose primary function is to store and retrieve data as requested by other software applications, be it those on the same computer or those running on another computer across a network...

, .NET and Microsoft Exchange Server

Microsoft Exchange Server

Microsoft Exchange Server is the server side of a client–server, collaborative application product developed by Microsoft. It is part of the Microsoft Servers line of server products and is used by enterprises using Microsoft infrastructure products...

. Red Gate tools include:

• SQL Source Control: Connects an existing source control system (TFS/SVN/VSS/Vault) to SQL Server
• SQL Compare: Compares and synchronizes database schemas
• SQL Prompt: Automated code completion and SQL reformatting
• SQL Backup: Offers compression and other features like encryption and network resilience for SQL Server database backups
• SQL Monitor: SQL Server performance-monitoring and alerting
• SQL HyperBac Silent compression for faster, smaller SQL Server backups
• SQL Storage Compress: Silent data compression to optimize SQL Server storage
• SQL Virtual Restore: Rapidly mounts live, fully functional databases direct from backups
• SQL Multi Script: Allows a user to execute multiple scripts against multiple SQL Servers with a single click
• SQL Data Compare: Compares and synchronizes database contents
• SQL Packager: Compares and synchronizes database schemas and contents and creates standalone .exe
• SQL Data Generator: Given a database schema, generates test/dummy data into the database
• Schema Compare for Oracle: Compares and synchronizes Oracle database schemas
• Exchange Server Archiver: Email archiving for Exchange Server
• ANTS Performance Profiler: Profiles the performance of .NET code
• ANTS Memory Profiler: Profiles the memory usage of .NET code
• .NET Reflector
  .NET Reflector
  .NET Reflector is a proprietary software utility for Microsoft .NET combining class browsing, static analysis and decompilation, originally written by Lutz Roeder. MSDN Magazine named it as one of the Ten Must-Have utilities for developers, and Scott Hanselman listed it as part of his "Big Ten...
  
  : Enables the user to explore and browse the class hierarchies of .NET assemblies, even if one does not have the code for them
• SmartAssembly: Obfuscates and protects .NET code
• SQL Test: A plug-in to SQL Server Management Studio, powered by the tSQLt unit testing framework http://www.red-gate.com/products/sql-development/sql-test/

HyperBac

HyperBac (or HyperBac Technologies) is part of Red Gate Software. Red Gate offers a range of products powered by HyperBac technology: SQL HyperBac, SQL Virtual Restore, and SQL Storage Compress.

The core HyperBac-powered products are based on a cross-platform file system compression

Data compression

In computer science and information theory, data compression, source coding or bit-rate reduction is the process of encoding information using fewer bits than the original representation would use....

/encryption

Encryption

In cryptography, encryption is the process of transforming information using an algorithm to make it unreadable to anyone except those possessing special knowledge, usually referred to as a key. The result of the process is encrypted information...

 filter, providing in-line compression and/or encryption for database and virtualization

Virtualization

Virtualization, in computing, is the creation of a virtual version of something, such as a hardware platform, operating system, a storage device or network resources....

 I/O operations. The HyperBac compression filter uses its own dictionary-based lossless compression algorithm and implements three different compression storage formats: SHRINK and SHRINKFAST (proprietary formats) and DEFLATE

DEFLATE

Deflate is a lossless data compression algorithm that uses a combination of the LZ77 algorithm and Huffman coding. It was originally defined by Phil Katz for version 2 of his PKZIP archiving tool and was later specified in RFC 1951....

.

HyperBac Technologies (formerly known as Xceleon Technologies) was formed in 2005 from founding developers of SQL LiteSpeed, a backup compression utility for SQL Server which was acquired by Quest Software

Quest Software

Quest Software is a computer software manufacturer headquartered in Aliso Viejo, California. Founded in 1987, Quest develops, manufactures and supports software used by Information Technology professionals in a variety of industries...

. On 22 March 2010, HyperBac was acquired by Red Gate Software.

Red Gate Springboard

In August 2009 Red Gate announced a new project called Springboard. Springboard was a startup incubator based in Cambridge, UK. For a period of three months Red Gate provided living expenses and mentoring for teams to work from Red Gate's offices. It was similar to YCombinator and Techstars

Techstars

TechStars is a mentorship-driven seed stage investment fund founded in 2006 by David Cohen, Brad Feld, Jared Polis and David Brown. TechStars provides seed funding for teams forming web/software companies. The organization holds programs in Boulder, Colorado, Boston, Massachusetts, Seattle,...

 in that it provided a small amount of capital up front but was different in that no equity was taken.

Springboard was relaunched in 2010 with a slightly different model where teams would again receive investment

Investment

Investment has different meanings in finance and economics. Finance investment is putting money into something with the expectation of gain, that upon thorough analysis, has a high degree of security for the principal amount, as well as security of return, within an expected period of time...

and mentoring but this time in exchange for an equity stake.