Joseph Conrad's "The Secret Agent" has taken an unexpected turn. It seems the novel is less about secret agentry and more about the corrosive effects of duplicity.

I'm almost at the point where I think SQLAutoDoc is ready for the real world. There are still a lot of things that I would like to add to it, but that will always be the case. Given unlimited time, I'd probably find a very reasonable need to add in javascript tetris. The next problem is what to do with it. Should I give it away? Try to sell it? I'm convinced it's quite useful and I'm not finding anything else that does quite exactly what it does. On the flip side, it does have some short-comings. It doesn't track user defined types, and tracking of foreign keys and indexes is pretty weak.

The trade off seems to be this: If I try to sell it, I need to have a decent setup program and documentation. I might also be called upon to support it, and need to decide how I would charge for support. If I give it away, I don't have to worry so much about setup and documentation but I have put hundreds of hours into the thing.

There's also an element of time: The next version of SQL Server is due out soon and it may be completely incompatible with SQLAutoDoc. It may even include functionality that makes SQLAutoDoc obsolete...