wagnerblog.com

I have been a pretty stalwart RedGate customer for a number of years. Which means in practical terms my review of this product is born out of hard-core usage in real production settings.

SQL Compare is one of those indispensable database utilities that most production shops absolutely swear by.  It sits in my tool belt right next to Lightspeed and Apex SQL Clean. Version Six of this product added some evolutionary changes that make a lot of sense considering the current market place and state of affairs.  But I get ahead of myself .

SQL Compare - what ?

It compares the objects of two SQL Server databases and tells you which are different. Then gives you the option to synchronize the two schemas. Big deal you might say. I can do that with [.. insert name of favorite stored proc or hand crufted utility program here .. ]  Actually to tell you the truth you probably can’t. Yes up to a point most DBA’s worth their paycheck have a set of scripts to help with synchronization and rollout tasks but I guarantee you that none of them would be as thorough, easy to use and low impact on your servers as this tool.

During my time as VP of Server Dev for SkillJam we had a live database system that supported 17 million users. Yes you’ve read that correctly. 17 million users - later it grew to 25MM - out of which we had about 3000-5000 concurrent users at any time.  And SQL Compare was able to roll out changes to the database with an absolute minimum of impact. Now mind you, we weren’t making those changes live with a bunch of users logged in. Of course not. But even during maintenance windows with the db taken offline, SQL Compare made the job reliable and a breeze.

In a large scale production environment the old saying that “time is money” really holds true. If we were down for an hour we lost real dollars. Several thousand. If we couldn’t send emails for a day we lost tens of thousands of dollars of revenue. So of course it becomes terribly important to roll out changes quickly and accurately. SQL Compare by virtue of its GUI and step driven approach made these changes literally childs-play.

Other uses

One of the newer features added in version six is the notion of saving the output of SQL Compare to a file. This opens up all sorts of interesting opportunities. The most important of them being the idea of database versions.

Yes I know Visual Studio and VSS allow you to version database objects already.

But if you are one of the many thousands of developers who has turned his back on  Visual Source Safe in favor of a more enlightened tool like Subversion for example - what can you do for version control?

Well here you have it. Just use SQL Compare.

The folks at RedGate have outlined some of the concepts and ideas of version control using SQL Compare in a white paper.

Of course Red Gate, the manufacturer of SQL Compare has a number of other tools available as well. One of these came in very handy in yet another scenario.

During my time at Skillam our CEO decided to internationalize the business and make our site(s) available all over Europe. Before you could say “Gesundheit” the company had hired ten new employees - all of whom were from a variety of European countries. Germany, Denmark, France, Italy. You name it. 

Together with this team of translators we proceeded to convert one of our products into German, French and Swedish in record time.  Red Gate software played a key role in this effort.  Our developers provided a quick Win32 front end to the translators in our office who then were able to line by line and word by word convert the site(s) content into the various languages.  Once translated we used SQL Data Compare - a very complimentary tool that actually synchronizes the data between two db’s to move the translations from dev to staging to production without any hiccups in record time. The entire effort required one developer and one DBA (part time). The sites were converted within a couple of weeks. We certainly would not have dreamed of this sort of productivity without the tools by Red Gate.

Bottom Line

I think its pretty clear that I am a big fan of this product. But don’t take my word for it, feel free to get yourself a trial version and kick its tires.  Its well worth your time.