Wednesday, December 5, 2007

SQL Compare for database change deployment

I recently tried out SQL Compare 6 for identifying differences between a production database and a development database that had a significant amount of changes. There were two things (of many) that stood out as valuable in my opinion. One was that the sychronization scripts used transactions which could be valuable when you are providing scripts for customer change deployment (especially when deploying to production servers). The other was the thoroughness of the comparison. It quickly identified indexes that the customer applied to the production database. It prevented me from creating redundant indexes when doing a performance optimization review. SQL Data Compare was handy as well. It saved time creating insert statements for a couple new lookup tables that were to be added to the production database.

SQL Compare is a must have tool for developers and dba's that regularly use SQL Server.