Why are DEFAULT values showing 2 parens (e.g. '((1))')

sspenser

This happens regularly for us... when we compare 2 databases, one in production and one that has the candidate changes for our next rollout, all DEFAULT values for columns in the database with candidate changes shows as having 2 parens on either side, e.g. '((1))' or '((0))'.

Every single one of these shows up as a change that someone has to slog through and ignore.

Has anyone else seen this behavior? Do you know why it is that this happens, and how we can get it to stop? This has happened across installation of SQL2000/SQL2005/SQL2008 on that server, so I don't think it's a SQL setting; and it's also happened across SQL Compare v7 and SQL Compare v8.

Any help is VERY much appreciated!
-Spenser

David Atkinson

This is unfortunately how SQL Server scripts it out, and I believe the number of parentheses varies depending on the SQL Server version. As SQL Compare is doing a textual comparison it flags it as a difference / false positive. However the main object comparison grid will not honor these as differences.

We hope to one day add semantic comparison 'intelligence' to the textual viewer.

Kind regards,

David Atkinson
Red Gate Software

PantherDBA

10 years later and schema compare still shows a default of (0) as different from ((0)).
This is using SQLCompare 14.5, the latest. I understand that this is an unfortunate practice of Microsoft's to generate varying numbers of paren pairs when scripting a table, but this should NOT be that difficult to code around.