How do I toggle on the Changed By column?

pharmkittie

Hello, I am the only one in my group who does not see a "Changed By" column in source control. Is this a column that can be shown/hidden?

I have tried to figure this out myself. in fact another member of my group did also. I have version 3.4.10 of RedGate Source Control. I use it to check in changes made to production. I've never needed the changed by column before but now I have a developer who is asking me how she can filter for only objects that have been changed by her. That's how I discovered that I don't even see this column.

So I have two questions:
1) What can I do to see the "Changed By" column
and
2) How can I give her a list of the objects she's changed. She just sees "Unknown" in all columns.

I have DBA/sysadmin privileges and she does not. I have read the thread within Redgate describing scenarios where only "Unknown" can be seen in the Changed By column but it was from a long time ago. Thanks for anticipated answers to one or both of my questions.

James B

Hi,
The most likely cause of the changed-by column not being there is if you linked up with the "dedicated" option set. When working in dedicated mode, we assume you are the only user of the database and the column is not shown.

If you're actually using shared mode, where you work on the same DB as others, then you just need to unlink and relink selecting "shared".

For full details on the differences, see here

pharmkittie

james.billings wrote:

Hi,
The most likely cause of the changed-by column not being there is if you linked up with the "dedicated" option set. When working in dedicated mode, we assume you are the only user of the database and the column is not shown.

If you're actually using shared mode, where you work on the same DB as others, then you just need to unlink and relink selecting "shared".

For full details on the differences, see here

Thanks Jim. This is what I needed. Do you think database administrators typically use shared mode rather than dedicated? On a somewhat different topic, should I be able to see who changed an object (rather than just seeing "Unknow" in the changed by column) more readily than a developer without sysadmin privileges? Or are there a number of reasons that there can be the value "unknown" in the column? Thanks again!

James B

There's a lot of reasons for seeing "unknown".
If you've not changed the configuration in any way, then we read the information from the default trace in SQL Server. This can roll over alarmingly regularly on a busy server, at which point we cannot retrieve the information, so you see "unknown".
The trace also requires SA permissions to read it I believe, so this would also be a possible cause.

To overcome some of these issues you can configure a separate database to log changes. See http://documentation.red-gate.com/displ ... +databases

Note that some changes don't get marked in the trace at all, and will always show unknown. There's a list at the bottom of the page linked above.

pharmkittie

james.billings wrote:

There's a lot of reasons for seeing "unknown".
If you've not changed the configuration in any way, then we read the information from the default trace in SQL Server. This can roll over alarmingly regularly on a busy server, at which point we cannot retrieve the information, so you see "unknown".
The trace also requires SA permissions to read it I believe, so this would also be a possible cause.

To overcome some of these issues you can configure a separate database to log changes. See http://documentation.red-gate.com/displ ... +databases

Note that some changes don't get marked in the trace at all, and will always show unknown. There's a list at the bottom of the page linked above.

I have all the information I need now. Thanks for answering my questions Jim.