SQL Compare v12 has landed! New look, support, and foundations for the future

I’m delighted to announce the stable release of SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare 12. We’ve spent hours, days, and months on development, including a beta program and Frequent Updates release to gather and incorporate user feedback along the way. Both releases are packed with a brand new user interface, support for SQL Server 2016 features, and enough bug fixes to shake a stick at.

You can get the updates via the in-tool help menu > ‘Check for Updates’, or download a free trial from our website.

Want to hear more about what’s new, why we’ve built it, and how? Read on…

SQLCompareGUI

Honeycomb

You might have noticed a big effort at Redgate to apply a common design to our products over the past few months – something we call Honeycomb. This new design architecture is already implemented in tools like SQL Monitor, and now 16-year-old SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare have had an overhaul too. I explained in my last blog post why we’re tackling this now:

“We’ve had over 200 bugs and feature requests relating to the UI codebase and, until now, we just haven’t been able to fix bugs or develop these features in a sensible way. This has all now changed. The codebase is much cleaner, we’ve fixed those bugs and, in the last ten days we’ve released six times. This latest release sets us up to make small, quick improvements to the user experience, on top of what’s already a stable and trustworthy core.”

SQL Compare is one of our oldest products so technically this has taken a lot of thought and time to get right. Functionally, everything will work the same, but now you’ll find the user interface cleaner, more intuitive, and a lot easier to work with.

We’ve been avidly listening to our users during development and incorporated their feedback throughout the beta period, so we hope you’ll share sentiments like this:

“I 100% like the new look and feel. The product is very easy to use and somehow you managed to incorporate a lot of familiarity with the updated look which I think is spot on. Not enough to cause data professionals to go into a panic but enough for us to be wowed.”
Chris Yates – DBA Manager – Republic Bank

It’s not only a visual overhaul: you can now easily switch between Redgate products from inside your tools. The tools you switch to will also detect which database you were working on. For example, if you’ve just documented a database with SQL Doc and you switch to SQL Compare, that database will be set as your source for a comparison:

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SQL Server 2016

SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare 12 support major new features in SQL Server 2016, so when you’re ready to move to 2016, Redgate is here to support you. The comparison tools already safely handle:

Next up we’ll be tackling support for Temporal Tables. Then we’ll be listening out for which 2016 features you want to adopt so let us know what you think we should be working on next.

Bug fixes, performance improvements, and enabling future development

The SQL Compare engine powers many other Redgate tools such as SQL Source Control and SQL Change Automation, so we’ve made sure these product development efforts are supported too. A recent example of this is the SQL Source Control 5 release which relied on support from SQL Compare 12 under the hood for its new migration scripts feature.

This development work has also allowed us to clear up a ton of bugs and make some performance improvements too. For example, we now register your data sources in parallel when performing the comparison to speed up the processing. For more details, check out the release notes.

One other thing – you’ll notice SQL Compare asks you to sign in when you launch v12. We’ve introduced user account licensing which paves the way for improved license management, such as remotely deactivating licences on other machines. Keep an eye on the Redgate blog for more on that very soon.

What’s next?

We’ll be highly responsive to any bugs reported in the wake of the v12 release. Then we’ll be looking at Temporal Tables in SQL Server 2016, and improvements to the comparison window, so you’ll be able to easily see a summary of the differences. This also checks off a couple of top voted tickets on UserVoice, which is good news.

Go get the upgrade!

If you have a supported version of the tools the good news is you can get SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare 12 straight away. Just ‘Check for Updates’ under the Help menu in-product.

If you’d like to upgrade, as an existing customer you’re entitled to a 30% discount so get in touch with our Sales team for a quote.

If you’re new to SQL Compare, try it free with a 14-day fully functional trial:

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Feedback

We hope you like the brand new faces of SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare but if you have any issues, contact support@red-gate.com and we’ll be happy to help.

Tools in this post

SQL Compare

Compare and synchronize SQL Server database schemas

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