Great tool - some feature suggestions
stevejmorgan
Posts: 3
Just used Data Compare at a client site to recover 48hrs of lost data (100k+ records) and it was an absolutely life saver - for the cleint - I get paid either way 
Got a couple of suggestions for features but can't find aware appropriate to leave them so I'll try here:
1. When you save a Data Compare project it should remember not only which tables/views you compared but also where you are upto in the comparison it's self i.e. we had to scan many thousands of records visually and decide whether to take the left of right version. Saving the project should also remember which records have have been "ticked" or "unticked".
2. This should also hold true when you refresh the comparison.
3. When you export the project you should be able to export the actual result of the comaprison as a html report, rather than a massice csv file of the physical data rows. I'm thinking of the functionality in Schema Compare where you can save the results to a html report that can be viewed later in a disconnected state. The idea of this is so you can take it to data consumers/decision makers to show the scale of a problem.
DOH! - just spotted I'm working with DC v6 and these features may be in v7....
Keep up the good work anyway!
Got a couple of suggestions for features but can't find aware appropriate to leave them so I'll try here:
1. When you save a Data Compare project it should remember not only which tables/views you compared but also where you are upto in the comparison it's self i.e. we had to scan many thousands of records visually and decide whether to take the left of right version. Saving the project should also remember which records have have been "ticked" or "unticked".
2. This should also hold true when you refresh the comparison.
3. When you export the project you should be able to export the actual result of the comaprison as a html report, rather than a massice csv file of the physical data rows. I'm thinking of the functionality in Schema Compare where you can save the results to a html report that can be viewed later in a disconnected state. The idea of this is so you can take it to data consumers/decision makers to show the scale of a problem.
DOH! - just spotted I'm working with DC v6 and these features may be in v7....
Keep up the good work anyway!
Comments
Redgate Software
Re the reports - just looked at functionality you described & it's not really what I had in mind.
I was thinking something more like the "Interactive HTML" report that you can create from SQL Compare that looks & behaves just like the app so I could show clients specific data issues...
Any thoughts on the other suggestion about persisting row level "ticked" status?
Steve
Currently a 'project' just holds the comparison selections, not the synchronization selections. However, this is a valid request and we'll include this in our feature request list.
I'd be interested to know if there are many other users who are looking for similar functionality. The more requests we get, the more likely it will make it into a future release.
Kind regards,
David Atkinson
Product Manager
Red Gate Software
Product Manager
Redgate Software
The ability to retain the results of the previous comparison and the tables/rows selected for synchronization would be a huge benefit to me. Of course, it may be necessary to add a prompt when opening a project with saved synchronization info to the effect of, "The underlying data in the tables you are comparing may have changed. Do you want to refresh the comparison?" or something like that.
Even if the underlying data has changed, if the rows selected for synchronization are identified by primary key, it should be possible to retain the selections even after comparison is refreshed.
Also, since saving the comparison results, along with selected rows, could create extremely large files (I have a separate volume just for Red Gate temp files; since I use Data Compare on tables with hundreds of thousands of rows the temp files can take up a couple GB at times), the feature to save comparison results and selections should be a project option, not set by default.
Thanks for the request. Could you describe the exact scenario where you would want to set up synchronization selections and reuse them at a later date? I can better understand wanting to save the comparison selections, but I'm not entirely sure I get why someone might want to synchronize something that they're presumably already synchronized.
Thanks,
David Atkinson
Red Gate Software
Product Manager
Redgate Software