Benefits: Robust, Secure, and Fast!
Unlike nearly every one of its competitors, ChimneySweep® is not based on the “Paradox® Table-Repair” utility (a.k.a. “TUTIL32”). This gives ChimneySweep many unique advantages:
It's robust:
Because ChimneySweep uses its own proprietary algorithms, it does not suffer from the many bugs that are found in the Paradox Table Repair utility. ChimneySweep repairs many common problems in-place, and it detects many problems that other tools cannot.
There is also a subtle difference of philosophy: ChimneySweep is not designed to be a tool that is to be used at the hands of an expert in an attempt to do heroic resuscitation of a dead database. Indeed, the product focuses just as much on early-detection and prevention as it does on after-the-fire repairs. And when it does come to repairs, “above all, do no further harm.” If ChimneySweep detects a serious problem that does not lend itself to a fully-automatic solution, it will report the problem in very-considerable technical detail, but will make no further attempt to automatically repair it.
It's secure:
ChimneySweep does not require the user to enter any table master-passwords, nor any other database passwords, during the course of a job. All of that information is securely stored within the job when the job is created. ChimneySweep respects the table-password protection mechanism and will not process a table if the correct master-password has not been included in the job.
ChimneySweep correctly recognizes that a database may be protected by more than one master-password. All of the passwords needed must be correctly available within the job. ChimneySweep never prompts the user for any database password.
It's fast!
How fast? Well, in one of our earliest tests against a million-record table, a competing technology cranked away for 14 hours and then died ... while an early version of ChimneySweep did the same job start-to-finish in less than 9 minutes! It would have been at least a 93-fold improvement, even “way back then,” had the other program actually finished... Today, on hardware that is of course many times bigger and faster, it’s less than 30 seconds.
In test after test, ChimneySweep leaves its competition in the dust. There is, in fact, a very-solid technical reason for that: “we use better algorithms.” We ask your computer hardware and software to work smarter, not harder, and we use considerably less resources. As soon as we know enough about a problem to understand what needs to be done to fix it, we focus on fixing it and don't waste time with gory details. Our strategies are fast and efficient, but also very direct and to-the-point. What you get is what you want: accuracy, efficiency, and speed.
And yes, you can use TUTIL32:
If you find that you absolutely must use TUTIL32 for some purpose, then, yes, it is possible to access that facility from within a ChimneySweep job. (But we quite frankly don’t recommend it.)