I first heard about this tool from my friend Greg at work. I’ve been using it the past couple of weeks now as a free trial and it’s awesome. Compare the structure and/or data of any two databases and synchronize them with just a few mouse clicks.
This tool is perfect for deploying database changes to different environments. It’s already saved me hours of time compared to what I would have spent trying to do things manually. I’ll definitely be buying a copy for myself. Every DBA should own a copy.
I haven’t used this one, but there is another tool out there called DBGhost that I’ve used for a long time. It scripts everything out for you and then you can check the scripts into version control.
When you go to synch up another system, you provide it the scripts and it will create a temp DB on the target server by running (and rerunning) scripts in the proper order. then it compares and updates the target DB.
Especially good for a) version controling your DB objects and b) deploying to environments where you cannot have a direct DB connection for securities sake.
Thanks for the tip. I hadn’t heard of DBGhost before. One of the nice things about Diff is that you can choose whether to display the change script or not. From there you can save it to a file and/or execute it in the environment.
You make a very good point on version controlling database objects. We should probably be using something like Diff or DBGhost in conjunction with a database project for our .NET apps at work.
Creating a temp database for comparison is a clever idea. It’s cool that DBGhost does this automatically. Diff works directly against the two databases being compared.