SQL Compare Release Notes

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SQL Compare 7.1

This is a minor update to SQL Compare. Along with a number of bug fixes there are two principal enhancements:

• Extended support for reading encrypted stored procedures and similar objects to SQL Server 2005 and 2008. (Usual dbo user permissions are required for reading decrypted content)
• Improved schema mappings, making it easier to compare objects between different schemas

SQL Compare 7.0


SQL Compare 7.0 features include:

Support for SQL Server 2008:

SQL Compare 7.0 supports SQL Server 2008 based on the currently available release candidate. SQL Server 2008 introduces new data types (table valued types, spatial data types, temporal data types), new and enhanced statements like merge, variable initialization and sparse columns, and many other features, all of which are supported by SQL Compare 7.0.

Support for reading backup files directly:

This release of SQL Compare also includes a new Professional Edition feature which allows using database backups directly in comparisons. There is no need to restore the database before a comparison, SQL Compare can read and understand the native SQL Server backup files. This includes backups made by SQL Server 2000, 2005 and 2008 (both compressed and uncompressed backups). SQL Compare 7.0 also supports backup files that are created by Red Gate’s SQL Backup tool, including compressed and encrypted backups.

There are also many small enhancements that enable SQL Compare to compare and synchronize databases more efficiently. These include
• Full support for ALTER AUTHORIZATION statements
• Using defaults in table rebuilds for columns that no longer allow null values, but are null
• Ability to deactivate a serial number
• Improved full text index support on views
• More warnings when table rebuilds would require column drops
• New options to ignore the database part of synonyms
• Better matching triggers, constraints, and other dependent objects that help identify differences visually

SQL Compare 6.1

SQL Compare 6.1 has been released and is now available for download.
This is a minor upgrade. New features include:

An option to ignore NOT FOR REPLICATION for check constraints, triggers, identity properties and foreign keys. This release also includes a few bug fixes.

To download the new release, please use the check for updates function in your existing installation's help menu, or visit the product page.

SQL Compare 6.1 - Fixes and enhancements

We have introduced the following features:
69235 - When the command line is given two identical databases to compare, it reports this as an error (with a return code of 63). There is now an option to report identical databases as a success (with a return code of 0). 69236 - The same option also allows you to see the results of the comparison when the databases are identical, generate reports etc.

67382 - We introduced an option to ignore NOT FOR REPLICATION clauses on identity fields, triggers, check constraints and foreign keys.

Note that when using the ignore NOT WITH REPLICATION option, in the case of triggers the Ignore Whitespace option will need to be used in order to properly ignore the clause, and in the case of constraints you may need to use the Ignore WITH NOCHECK option to ignore the fact that all NOT FOR REPLICATION constraints are considered untrusted by SQL Server, and hence marked as 'WITH NOCHECK'.

We have fixed the following bugs:
69242, 69191 - Stack overflow on reading a script with a view referring to an identically-named view in another database

69265, 69282 - Regional settings with different decimal point characters caused errors and silent failures on reading stored procedures with decimal points from script

69096 - The command line displayed an unhandled exception if it couldn't find a database snapshot file

69139 - The help text for 'Ignore Statistics' in the Options tab of the Project Configuration dialog was wrong

69147 - If Database Tuning Advisor terminates abnormally, it can leave hypothetical indexes in your database. SQL Compare used to treat these as normal indexes and attempt to synchronize them. (Now SQL Compare just ignores these indexes, as they are not a real part of your database.)

69328 - If you had a comment on the same line as 'WITH SCHEMABINDING' in your object creation SQL, and SQL Compare needed to remove schemabinding from the object temporarily, the synchronization failed due to 'WITH' being left behind in the synchronization script.

69342 - The 'copy to clipboard' functionality, obtained by right-clicking on one of the synchronization wizard information panes, was throwing a NullReferenceException when a Warning had no associated object.

69358 - Regional settings could sometimes cause projects to appear unreadable (i.e. SQL Compare would claim the file was not a vaild project) because of differences in the date format. (We now check if we can open the project using the Invariant culture as well as the current culture, which fixes most issues, although there still may be some problems if you regularly change between very different date formats.)

69382 - An old version of Crystal Reports introduced some INFORMATION_SCHEMA objects into databases, which made them impossible to register with SQL Compare. (We should now register the database, ignoring the INFORMATION_SCHEMA objects.)

SQL Compare 6.0
SQL Compare 6.0 has been released and is now available for download.
This is a major upgrade. New features include:

• Comparison and synchronization to and from object SQL scripts
• Export data source to a scripts folder
• Next/previous difference navigation
• Side-by-side and over-and-under difference viewing panes
• Differences window now text searchable
• View object creation SQL script
• Incremental text search for projects

To download the new release, please use the check for updates function in your existing installation's help menu, or visit the product page.

SQL Compare 6 has fixed over 700 issues raised since version 3. The most important fixes in this version are:

• Data Compare samples raise LoaderLock warning on .NET2
• Synchronisation Wizard Calculating Dependencies Failure Exception
• Less-than-graceful handling of non-EMCA-compliant assemblies
• exception when using check for updates as non-admin user
• Length or precision specification 0 is invalid when migrating CLR function with nvarchar(max)
• Indexers on PartitionFunctions and PartitionSchemes collections return null after snapshot load
• Assemblies which depend on each other are scripted in an incorrect
• Typo in the Filter Objects panel
• SQL Difference View doesn't Show the difference between CR and CRLF
• SQL Compare reports CLR Procedure Parameters as nvarchar(0) instead of nvarchar(max)
• IGNORE WITH ORDER having side effects
• Unhandled exception on starting application with Matrox card
• SQL Compare doesn't clean up its temp files
• System.NullReferenceException when comparing against a snapshot and the password is not saved
• System.NullReferenceException in SQLCompare.Engine.BlobStore when viewing XML Schema Collection
• Does not cancel during register for data compare
• Error saving snapshot file
• CLR Assemblies containing multiple files make sync fail
• The SQL for orphaned windows users is incorrect
• View object synchronization script feature needs to be a tab
• Allow the user to specify where the projects are located...
• "CLR: Got ""Corrupt metadata tables header"" exception..."
• When ignoring event notifications on queues the event notification is still displayed
• SQL Compare does not detect extended properties on DRI defaults
• When generating a large report there is no progress dialog or hour glass
• Improve text on the options dialog (the word ignore is easy to miss) UI Solved
• Database could be IDisposable