SQL Compare^®

Save time; help your home life

This is a letter to us from a customer, printed verbatim.

Fred Brooks declares that the Man-Month is mythical. However, I can vouch for the fact that the Man-Week is not, and in the very short time that I've been using SQL Compare, that is at least what I've already saved in development time.

I've been developing applications that use a Microsoft SQL Server back end for about 10 years now, for clients spread throughout Vermont and New York. In the past, I've tried numerous techniques to keep track of changes made to the structure of the databases between drops. All of the methods I tried were time- and labor-intensive and prone to error. (I was especially bad about remembering to set permissions properly when I would deliver an application, and almost invariably had to connect to the site remotely or even revisit a site to correct a few incorrectly set permissions on stored procedures.)

It was always embarrassing to me when I got to a site and had to spend a lot of time manually tweaking the database to get the application to work correctly. Frequently, I ended up missing dinner with my family, as an already full on-site schedule forced me to work into the evening to get a particularly uncooperative update to work correctly.

Since I started using SQL Compare, I've simplified this aspect of my development life considerably. Immediately after a drop is installed at the client, I take a new snapshot of my database, which at that instant in time is identical to the one at the client site. From then on, I don't touch the snapshot, but do whatever I need to with the development database. When I'm ready for the next drop, I run SQL Compare to identify the differences between the two databases, generate a script, test it (on a copy of the copy of the original database), and I'm ready for the drop. I've not only literally saved days of effort on each drop, I've even begun sending very substantial upgrades via email to sites with a local technician (thus saving myself significant travel time). That's how confident I am in the database update now. I haven't missed dinner due to update problems since.

You have a wonderful product. I thank you. My clients thank you. My family thanks you.

Mark Payton