Redgate Software is a software company based in

Cambridge, England Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge became ...

. It develops tools for developers and data professionals and maintains community websites such as SQL Server Central and Simple Talk. Redgate produces specialized

database management In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases spa ...

tools for

Microsoft SQL Server Microsoft SQL Server is a relational database management system developed by Microsoft. As a database server, it is a software product with the primary function of storing and retrieving data as requested by other software applications—which ...

Oracle An oracle is a person or agency considered to provide wise and insightful counsel or prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by deities. As such, it is a form of divination. Description The word ...

MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database ...

and

Microsoft Azure Microsoft Azure, often referred to as Azure ( , ), is a cloud computing platform operated by Microsoft for application management via around the world-distributed data centers. Microsoft Azure has multiple capabilities such as software as a ...

. It also produces advanced developer tools for

.NET Framework The .NET Framework (pronounced as "''dot net"'') is a proprietary software framework developed by Microsoft that runs primarily on Microsoft Windows. It was the predominant implementation of the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) until bein ...

, such as SmartAssembly and

.NET Reflector .NET Reflector is a class browser, decompiler and static analyzer for software created with .NET Framework, originally written by Lutz Roeder. MSDN Magazine named it as one of the Ten Must-Have utilities for developers, and Scott Hanselman li ...

. From 2007 to 2013 it was featured in the ''Sunday Times ''100 best companies to work for in the United Kingdom. It has won numerous industry awards for its SQL Server management software.

History

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

Florence Florence ( ; it, Firenze ) is a city in Central Italy and the capital city of the Tuscany region. It is the most populated city in Tuscany, with 383,083 inhabitants in 2016, and over 1,520,000 in its metropolitan area.Bilancio demografico ...

Italy Italy ( it, Italia ), officially the Italian Republic, ) or the Republic of Italy, is a country in Southern Europe. It is located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical ...

, close to where Davidson used to live. In 2005, Redgate launched Simple Talk, an online technical journal and community hub for working

and .NET developers, as well as systems and database administrators. The journal is sponsored by Redgate, but retains

editorial independence Editorial independence is the freedom of editors to make decisions without interference from the owners of a publication. Editorial independence is tested, for instance, if a newspaper runs articles that may be unpopular with its advertising ...

. In addition to publishing articles, Simple Talk publishes books, most of which are available in a

digital format Digital data, in information theory and information systems, is information represented as a string of discrete symbols each of which can take on one of only a finite number of values from some alphabet, such as letters or digits. An example is ...

. On 20 August 2008, Redgate announced it was taking responsibility for future development of the free tool

. On 22 March 2010, HyperBac Technologies (formerly known as Xceleon Technologies) was acquired by Redgate. HyperBac developed SQL software tools and products. In August 2009, Redgate launched Springboard, a startup

incubator An incubator is anything that performs or facilitates various forms of incubation, and may refer to: Biology and medicine * Incubator (culture), a device used to grow and maintain microbiological cultures or cell cultures * Incubator (egg), a de ...

based in Cambridge, UK. For a period of three months Redgate provided living expenses and mentoring for teams to work from Redgate's offices. It was similar to

Y Combinator Y Combinator (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch more than 3,000 companies, including Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Quora, PagerDuty, Reddit, St ...

and Techstars in that it provided a small amount of capital up front but no equity was taken. In 2010, Redgate re-launched Springboard with a different model where teams would again receive

investment Investment is the dedication of money to purchase of an asset to attain an increase in value over a period of time. Investment requires a sacrifice of some present asset, such as time, money, or effort. In finance, the purpose of investing is ...

and mentoring, but this time in exchange for an

equity Equity may refer to: Finance, accounting and ownership *Equity (finance), ownership of assets that have liabilities attached to them ** Stock, equity based on original contributions of cash or other value to a business ** Home equity, the diff ...

stake. One such recipient of investment-for-equity in 2016 was

Berlin Berlin ( , ) is the capital and largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's most populous city, according to population within city limits. One of Germany's sixteen constitu ...

-based 3T Software Labs, makers of Studio 3T, the IDE for MongoDB, a popular NoSQL database. On March 7, 2017, at the launch of Microsoft Visual Studio 2017, Microsoft announced the inclusion of Redgate Data Tools in that product. Three components were included: ReadyRoll Core and SQL Prompt Core, both in the Enterprise edition of Visual Studio 2017, and SQL Search in all editions. On January 28, 2021 Redgate announced it had acquired the assets of the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS). In December 2021, Redgate announced that Jakub Lamik was taking up the position as CEO of the company, and that Simon Galbraith would remain on the board as a Non-Executive Director.

Awards

References

External links

*
Simple Talk
(technical journal and community hub)
SQL Server Central
(SQL Server education and community website)
All Things Oracle
(technical journal) {{Authority control Software companies of the United Kingdom Companies based in Cambridge Software companies established in 1999 1999 establishments in England