Friday, 11 September 2009 10:04 by
SyntaxC4For those of us that don't have the ability to find synergy in our work life balance there is always alot running through our mind. Personally, I know I have a responsibility to find a speaker on a monthly basis for CTTDNUG, try to think up ways to attract developers out to Coffee and Code, plus learning new technologies (Silverlight, Sharepoint, .NET 3.5, etc). With all this on my mind on a regular basis floating around while i'm developing, I tend to get distracted from time to time while doing some tasks.
When dealing with Database code in particular I have found myself at a miss, when i try to remember if I have updated all of the Stored Procedures, Tables, and Functions when migrating or upgrading a system to a new server, or newer version. When you're under the gun to produce some results you don't have the time to manually filter through the database to ensure that you've migrated all of the changes from your development database to the production server.
Recently I ran into such scenerio, I was updating an internal system that is used quite extensively at my job, and I knew the system couldn't be down for very long. Along the way a few of my ALTER SQL Scripts errored out for whatever reason in a bulk update and I gasped. Quickly I ran off to Bing to find a tool to do a comparison between my development and production database. I came across xSQL Object and it saved the day. The UI was relatively easy to follow, all you had to do was add the databases you needed to compare, and run a comparison. Having used other tools like this before the process is relatively straight forward. Where it differred was the speed of the software. The comparison was a relatively small database but in a blink of an eye I was staring at a report of the differences in the two databases [see Figure 1].
Needless to say I quickly figured out the Stored Procedures that didn't get updated and was able to run the ALTER statements against the database to get things up and running again.
If you notice a difference between the two versions of an object, you are able to visually compare the SQL Code that has syntax highlighting as well it highlights the sections of code that are either missing or are extra between the two versions.
If you ever find yourself in this situation, I would definately suggest downloading the trial of xSQL Object which is a full 2 weeks. If you find yourself relying on this kind of functionality, the licensing options are available and are reasonable compared to other tools. Plus they offer a discount if you are to buy a license during the first week of your trial period.
Go Forth and Query!