My New Favorite Tool

I needed to do a SQL Diff today <coughing>Yukon team pay attention</coughing> and I came across a great program called Beyond Compare. It lets me load up 2 files side-by-side, and shows me where there are differences. It let me compare the outputs of SQLEM-generated scripts, and see where changes were made. It was a HUGE help. It is not without problems though. Line editing is clumsy (you can only edit one line at a time, and you can't edit the file directly) however they do make it easy to copy text between the files. All in all, it's a great product, and well worth the $30.

I understand the program also works with directories and non-text files. It's a must-have for any web application developer. They just released a new version today, so go check it out. Hopefully they'll update it to managed code soon (web service anyone?) ;).

5 Comments

  • Hi,

    redgat sql compare bundle might be of your interest too... I use it a lot and I'm quite satisfied :-)



    K.

  • Good morning! Beyond compare has beem one of my favorites for a long time. You might want to check out araxis merge as well. They have slightly cooler UI, but less abilities. Still some people prefer them.

  • windiff is a free tool that does the same thing....

  • There is a big difference between Text differencing tools and SQL Differencing tools. To use text tools to synchronize and compare databases requires one to script all objects to text. Although this is doable, it could take hours if you have 1000's of objects(SQL-DMO is really bad is this regard). Also, you do not get a synchronization script.

    These modern SQL compare tools go directly against the schema information for the comparable databases and produce reports AND synchronization scripts for the deltas. The compares are very fast because they bypass SQL-DMO(AdeptSQL and Lockwood).

  • Doing a text diff was not that bad... it only took me about an hour, and I was able to generate a synchronization script no sweat.



    That being said, I'd rather use a SQL diff tool. Hopefully this functionality will be in Yukon.

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