A year or so back, I struggled with some consistency problems so I figured out I needed a way to "mount" backup files as a virtual database. At the time (SQL Server 2005 and SQL Server 2008) my choice fell on Idera's SQLvdb because it felt easy enough to use.

I used it a few times and it worked great. Some time later we upgraded to SQL Server 2008R2 and I didn't use SQLvbd for a long time. Until yesterday...

I was upset that suddenly SQLvbd took more than 2 hours to mount the backup file (if it succeeded at all). I uninstalled the application and went for lunch. After lunch, I decided to give SQLvbd another chance so I emailed their tech support and got a response within 30 minutes or so.
Now, since I am a SQL Server MVP, they gave me another serial number than my first and I downloaded and installed a newer version. But also this version was really slow.
I emailed back to them with the additional information they requested and to my surprise I had got an email this morning when I came back to work, where Idera explained some of the issues (bugs) and asked my to test a newer version.

I did, and now a fresh mount of a 100GB database (compressed to 20GB with native compression) located on our SAN takes less than 6 minutes!

Thank you.

//Peter