Keeping an audit trail of changes

The situation

You need to maintain an ongoing record of changes made to the database throughout your project. When you've got a dozen or more developers, under increasing time-pressure to deliver the latest phase of the project on time, it's too easy to put off this tedious and non-critical step.

Key challenges

  • Fulfilling project requirements without increasing time overhead.
  • Archiving all changes during database development and on live servers on a regular basis.

How we can solve it

Use the SQL Toolkit to schedule a task to archive a report of the changes as a nightly job:

  1. Create a script to execute SQL Compare to compare the schema of the current database with the schema of the previous version, produce a report of the differences, and archive the report.
    If required, you can also use SQL Compare to create a snapshot of the database schema.
  2. Create a script to execute SQL Data Compare to compare the data in the databases, produce a report of the differences, and archive the report.
  3. Add a scheduled task to run the scripts using the Windows Scheduled Task Wizard.

You can gain even more flexibility by using the SQL Toolkit™ to create an application, which you can run within your own programs, if required.

Benefits of our solution

  • Automated task means no time-overhead for developers, and the task is not forgotten.
  • Human error is eliminated.

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