SourceGear Vault Review

Sourcegear Vault is a source control server that is designed to be a replacement for Visual Source Safe.

Rather than write a long review, I’ll list the major pros and cons:

Pros:
1. Client is very easy to use. Even with no training in any source control system I think most users can accomplish what they want with little direction. Perforce, by comparison (which is the next closest comparison) is very difficult to use and it is both possible and likely you will lose data because of this.
2. You can work by changing files locally and merging and checking them in. Or you can do the usual checkout / change / checkin method.
3. It doesn’t create files on your local harddrive (Perforce also has this benefit). CVS and Subversion both create files on your harddrive, which is really annoying when trying to make builds.
4. It has a command line Linux client.
5. It’s half the price of Perforce.
6. It uses a real database, rather than try to reinvent the wheel as does Perforce.
7. All but one of my support posts on the forum were answered quickly.

Cons:
1. It’s slow to connect to – takes about 10 seconds even on localhost with a fast computer.
2. The command line Linux client requires Mono, and my users indicate that is an unacceptable dependency. Perforce has better support for Linux.
3. While it comes with a web interface, the web interface is useless for anything other than looking at the directory structure.
4. Depends on Microsoft’s expensive SQL database, rather than MySQL, a free alternative. Microsoft has a free version of their database but it comes with restrictions. I heard you can purchase the SQL database from SourceGear cheaper, but this is unconfirmed.
5. Depends on Microsoft’s IIS, which is very difficult to configure and is inferior to Apache. In fact after 5 days I still don’t have it working right. “The Vault server could not be contacted to perform the operation. Your network connection to the server may have been interrupted. Please verify your network settings using the Options dialog under the Tools menu in the Vault GUI Client.The request failed with HTTP status 403: Access Forbidden.” This may be an IIS error, but I really consider it to be a Vault error, because Vault has a needless dependency on IIS and the only reason I installed IIS is because Vault depends on it.
6. My friend Jason told me it’s very slow with very large databases.