Azure, checksum, and sp_table_validation

[jjorczak]

When trying to do a checksum compare with a SQL Azure database, SQL Data Compare reports that 'sp_table_validation' is not found. Is there a workaround for this?

[james.billings]

Thanks for your post.

The procedure you mention doesn't appear to exist in Azure (at least, if I connect to an Azure instance and try to execute it, it says it doesn't!)

As this is the procedure that's used to perform the checksum in "normal" SQL, the workaround is to basically turn that option off.

I'll have a chat to the developers though to see if there's some alternative offered in Azure that it could use instead.

[jjorczak]

Thanks. I am wondering this this sp can be deployed to the local database and used?

[james.billings]

No idea; it's a system one so if it's not supported in Azure I would guess there's a reason for that. It may be to avoid performance problems, or possibly it's because it relies on some other feature in SQL Server that's also not present in Azure.