Feature Request: Select Object Types *Before* Comparison

BorisNikolaevichBorisNikolaevich Posts: 6
edited September 14, 2007 6:10PM in SQL Compare Previous Versions
We recently upgraded to version 6 from a previous version.

As noted in this topic, the ability to select the types of objects to be included in the comparison before running the comparison was removed because current versions of SQL Compare are so much faster.

This may generally be true, but I work in an ERP environment (Microsoft Dynamics GP) with hundreds of tables, hundreds of stored procedures, hundreds of triggers... you get the idea.

What makes the nightmare worse is that we have vendors coming in all the time who are used to implementing whatever changes they think they need to, and SQL Compare has been invaluable in identifying and documenting changes between the test environment and the production environment. Unfortunately, even with SQL Server 2005 64-bit running on multiple processors, the "Registering Databases" step alone takes half an hour or more, and then another hour or two for the actual comparison... this is very frustrating when we only need to verify a few stored procedures or triggers.

I would like to request the ability to select "Types of Objects to Compare" before running a comparison. An even better enhancement would be to further filter each object type using wildcards, since we use specific naming conventions to distinguish built-in, vendor-supplied, and in-house code.

Comments

  • Boris,

    Thanks for your feedback.

    I can understand your point of view that it is frustrating when you only want to view certain objects that you have to process everything else.

    However, without parsing all the objects in the database it is not possible to get a true idea of what dependencies are involved in the database and without this information we cannot generate clean synchronization scripts. So if we add this option I can foresee that you may have to take a hit a different area.

    However, the main problem is that I cannot see a change of this scale being sanctioned at the moment, as to implement a pre-compare filter would mean a massive change in the engine. Which we would want to avoid doing in a point release.

    However, I have raised this in our bug tracking system, and it will be one of the areas that we will research into when we consider the next major raft of features to be implemented.

    Regards,

    Jonathan
    Jonathan Watts

    -Project Manager
    -Red Gate Software Ltd
  • Boris,

    Sounds like you need a full Modeling tool that allows you to create subject areas so you can work with sub-set of database objects. I'm new to SQL Compare and have only used Erwin in the past. Since I do not need all the functionality of a data modeling tool, I've started working with SQL Compare.

    Since this is not a modeling tool, I can understand not being able to filter out specific objects names but I do agree that you should at least be able able to select the types of objects before running a compare. If you only need to compare stored procedures, no sense in the engine parsing through all the other objects.

    For what it's worth, add my vote for the "Types of Objects to Compare" option.

    David
  • David,

    You vote has been noted. As I have said this isn't the most popular feature request we get, it is about two thirds of the away up the list of requests at the moment, but it will be investigated prior to the next release.

    Regards,

    Jonathan
    Jonathan Watts

    -Project Manager
    -Red Gate Software Ltd
  • Boris,

    Hundreds of tables/procedures/triggers is no big deal. I compare such databases all the time and it rarely takes more than a minute or two. My workstation is
    Quad 1.8 Hz Dual Core AMD Opteron 2210
    4Gb memory

    I have a dedicated workstation for Red gate tools, so I don't run anything else when I run SQL compare. Let's troubleshoot your delays. Try running Profiler and figure out which queries are slow. Try running Compare against only test servers that are not busy with anything else.

    Alex Kuznetsov
    SQL Server MVP
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