SQL Compare®
User testimonials
About 18 months ago, I was installing a second instance of SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services on a 64-bit server. There was already a Native Mode instance, but the new instance was going to be in Sharepoint Integrated mode. I didn’t have any other resources and needed to consolidate services on the existing server.
Though I had already rehearsed the installation on a test server several times, during the production installation, the procedure got hosed in the middle somehow. It reached about 90% the way through the installation, but never completed, even on multiple attempts. Since this was a production machine, already hosting reports in Native Mode, so I did not have the ability to start from scratch with a new build.
Instead, I used the Red Gate SQL Compare product to study the differences between my test installations and the new (''hosed'') production installation. I was able to find several objects (tables and views) that were missing. Using the SQL Compare product, I was able to create the missing objects right from the software and apply them to the production server. Apparently, this is all that was needed. After a reboot, everything started to come to life and working as desired.
The server has been running healthy ever since. SQL Compare saved the day for me and the company.
"I used SQL Compare with a previous employer and loved it so much I brought the experience here. This time, we bought the whole package. Love it!"
''We recently purchased the SQL Comparison Bundle and got to try out the other tools, such as SQL Refactor, at the same time. I have to say firstly that I am very impressed with the quality and rich, practical functionality built into your software! The software is well-written, intuitive, with close attention to detail, and is full of the kind of functions one needs the most. I can see that a lot of DBA feedback has gone into the process - take SQL Refactor's SmartRename for instance - only a DBA who works a lot with stored procs would think of that – and you have it! Well done!
Secondly, the SQL Comparison Bundle we bought has shaved days off our database sync and upgrade tasks, and helped to increase the accuracy of the updates to 99%, making our lives much easier and our turn-around times much shorter.
I think that the Red Gate suites are terrific value for money! Many thanks to all at Red Gate''
"Red Gate's SQL Tools were invaluable during our last database upgrade from SQL Server 2000 to a SQL Server 2005 cluster. SQL Compare allowed us to quickly evaluate changes in the database immediately after moving them to SQL 2005. The Synchronize feature very easily allowed us to reconcile differences between the two databases. It was simple and straightforward to make the exact changes we wanted.
Now that we have moved our infrastructure to SQL 2005, SQL Compare helps us rapidly synchronize our development, test and production environments."
"I bless the day we bought SQL Compare – it saves me time so often. Must have paid for itself a hundred times over. There's almost nothing I would change about it."
"Just wanted to drop you a note to say that SQL Compare has saved the day again. This time, it REALLY saved the day. After spending hours looking at code, SQL and reading more about SQL Server query hints and performance tuning than I ever wish to do again, I simply ran SQL Compare against a working database and the poorly performing one. In seconds the problem was obvious and the solution easy. Time to go home and have a beer. SQL Server 0 : Red Gate 1. Nice!"
"Love your products, service, and support. I am only a two-man shop, but feel like I get a good deal for my hard-earned money when I deal with you guys. If I were across the pond, I'd buy you a pint of Guinness. Cheers from Baton Rouge, Louisiana (USA)"
"One of the key draws for Red Gate tools has always been the price point and the rapid return on investment. The SQL Bundle has been a standard for my toolbox since 2000, across 4 jobs."
"The thing I love most about SQL Compare is that it reduces a mind-numbingly tedious, severely time-consuming task, down to a handful of button-clicks, and a casual glance. The mistaken assumption that Dev Studio 7.1 database create and change scripts produce exact schema duplicates just cost a team of programmers untold hours trying to debug the ubiquitous "it works on the dev server but not in production" problem, at the application level. I solved it inside of 20 minutes, with SQL Compare – missing timestamp column on one table, and an exception being ignored because it was in place where "nothing could go wrong." (The latter easily pinpointed once the nature of the mismatch was known.)
There are times that I love this business, this would be one of them -- but truth be told, this moment I have you to thank for. Because without SQL Compare, and given 700 rows in sysobjects plus 13,000 rows in syscolumns in the production db, it would've taken me hours upon hours to find... Now what to do with the rest of my day? :-)"
"In some projects we have five simultaneous database environments to keep in synch. I downloaded the SQL tools from Red Gate and the next 14 days were the best SQL days in my life."
"I have just purchased SQL Compare and within a few minutes it has saved me a couple of days of tedious, error-prone work. This product is exactly what I need – it is absolutely excellent and I congratulate you on the production of such a useful item."
"SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare are the best purchases we've made in the .NET/SQL environment. They've saved us hours of development time and the fast, easy-to-use database comparison gives us maximum confidence that our migration scripts are correct. We rely on these products for every deployment."
"All the Red Gate products I used are a delight – SQL Bundle and ANTS Profiler. Simple to use, powerful, fast – awesome. I told some of our DBAs that they MUST use your products. If you are a DBA and reading this testimonial, and if you don't use Red Gate's software, trust me! You should. I have never written a testimonial before, but I felt compelled to do so in this case. I cannot stress strongly enough how wonderful this company's tools are. THANK YOU!"
"SQL Compare has saved us an awful lot of time and code and allowed us to get our version control organised across our 40 data warehouses...Like I said, great product, great value."
"I was able to compare the two databases together. The comparison was a success. I didn't find any major flaws within the structures of the two databases. Thank you and your company for the time you spent to help me."
"We use the SQL Compare tool constantly for moving stuff from dev to live. Frankly, we couldn't cope without it now."
"Your product is simply the best at what it does. At my company, we have bought a few copies of SQL Compare and everyone is very happy with it. You have kept the tool lean and free from unnecessary fluff. It is very very efficient and so damn intuitive. The interface is spartan with just the right options – the kind every techie wants. Man!!!! Your product rocks."
"We are very impressed with your software. I heard about SQL Compare from a good friend and colleague of mine and tried it out – we were in the middle of a problem involving the migration of database changes from our development environment to our production environment and had been beating our brains to death for a few hours trying to figure it out.
After we installed SQL Compare, within a minute, we knew what the problem was and were able to apply the differences to the production environment and we had fixed our problem. All thanks to SQL Compare! We also found that SQL Compare makes a great audit tool when using the snapshots feature."
"We have been working on a (Ceridian) upgrade and new installation of some features and have been having some connection issues. After trying to figure out why end-users were getting connection errors in production but not in development it occurred to me it might be an user/role issue. This application has a lot of custom roles, so looking through them in EM was not an attractive solution.
Then I remembered I had SQL Compare on a development box and figured I would give it a try. It worked like a charm! I was able to compare scripts and almost immediately see what roles were different in the two databases. This allowed us to go back to the vendor with solid data, and within 24 hours they had determined that one of their administrative processes, that is run infrequently, was resetting the particular role's permissions."
"Tracking and releasing SQL code as it's being developed on one server, tested on a second, and is in live use on a third, was always a daunting task, especially when sometimes emergency fixes were made on the live server, but not backmerged down to the other servers. With SQL Compare, we finally found a tool that simplifies our releases 1000%. And with the new version, releases that used to take 20–30 minutes now take about 5. Hats off to Red Gate. You guys are (as they say down in customer service) 'Da Bomb!'"
"We have a product that we are regularly producing updates for. Sysdepends is really messed up (throughout the development cycle there have been renames of tables etc., etc.). Before, sysdepends corruption meant that we had to massively re-order a script to make it run – it took about an hour to make a script work. I took a really old version of the database and compared it against the new one (i.e. – would have been a disaster under the older versions), and the [SQL Compare 3.15] script worked straight off.
So, for me at least, the sysdepends stuff makes a huge difference. I mean mega. In fact, words cannot describe how much of a difference this will make to our daily lives. It was so bad, we were planning to evaluate whether any of the other SQL Compare-type products would have done the job for us...but thank goodness, now we don't have to. Sign me up for the Red Gate fan club..."
"I am installed and comparing already. We have a major build today and this means I get to go home at normal hours instead of very late. We have a database that takes over 2 hours to compare in 2.03. So to script and build and confirm would take about 8 hours to complete. But with 3.1, I am almost done with the first step."
"Having tried a previous version at a previous company, and loving it, I didn't hesitate to download and demo the new version at my new company. I was astounded by how much faster the new version was (and the old version wasn't a turtle to begin with). You took an already great product and made it a slam dunk. So, I could do the job by hand in hours, or use SQL Compare in seconds."
"I love your new version. It's sooooo fast. You must have either removed loads of redundant code or had a major breakthrough :-) It helps us so much in our development work deploying new versions of our .NET based web applications. It's amazing how fast it now registers huge databases, even over remote and slow links. Our application has around 100 big tables, loads of views and stored procedures. Every time we are updating schemas for version changes, on all our deployed applications, your tool is a big help. Thanks for a brilliant tool."
"My database structure is complex and although previous versions of SQL Compare were vital to my success, it would take six to eight hours to complete database comparisons. The same database comparison now takes less than 10 minutes. I just love this new version of SQL Compare 3.
It is the only third-party tool that I use on a regular basis. I have investigated other tools that do database synchronization, but none of them have the robust set of features and functionality of SQL Compare 3. I consistently recommend this tool to other DBAs as I could not accomplish the amount of work that I do without SQL Compare. I have been a customer since 1.0 and am amazed (and pleased) at the logical and wonderful progression of this product."
"WOW!! Super Job!! This upgrade to an already outstanding product has sensible, intelligent changes and outstanding performance! I love this tool!"
"It's awesome. It clearly shows database differences in a way that is easy to understand. You can apply synchronization automatically, eliminating the need for any manual cutting and pasting. The speed and interface improvements have made SQL Compare the central tool for our change control process."
"The user interface is slick. It actually surpasses Red Gate's usual high standard. In general, it feels like I have gone from version 2 to version 100."
"I'm impressed. Let me repeat that with emphasis – I'M IMPRESSED! The user interface is much better. Performance is awesome. I'm bugging everyone here that has it to check out the new version and I'm in the process of finding out if we can get everyone here upgraded. Between the performance bumps and the ability to develop synchronize scripts, this will become a tool for all of our developers."
"Thank you!
It's Be-eautiful!
And Faaaaaast!
Wow.
Great work."
"We have evaluated the software and my company has now purchased it. I have nothing negative to say about it. I was not immediately convinced when you emailed me to say the new version was 50 to 100 times faster than the previous one. However, I have to say that when we tried the new version, it was much much faster and it really lived up to your claim. ... All in all, a great bit of software!"
"SQL Compare is a truly valuable tool for any developer that values their time. Having evaluated a couple of similar but more expensive products, I can honestly say it is streets ahead of the competition. Having been involved in developing a similar product for Access, I can see the product from a developer's standpoint as well – it is exactly the way I would have developed the tool if it hadn't existed.
I have had the opportunity to show SQL Compare to other developers at User Groups and conferences and I can only say that I get nothing but thanks for enlightening users about the necessity for this product. Well done."
"SQL Compare has significantly improved our database testing capabilities. This tool has given us immediate diagnosis of missing database items and provides an excellent utility for testing future versions of our database structures. SQL Compare has helped improve the quality of our software releases."
"My job used to consist almost entirely of comparing SQL databases, by hand. Now that I've started using SQL Compare I've bought a pair of glasses, painted on eyes, and now spend much of my day snoozing."
"Just wanted to thank you for a great product. I have a bundle with SQL Compare 5 and its partner Data Compare. I have used SQL Compare a couple of times lately when moving our new development stuff to live server to save time. Works beautifully.
Then yesterday we had to move our production server to another and bigger server. By using SQL Compare and Data Compare, we managed to move our 5 GB database to our new server with approximately 30 seconds of downtime... We just used SQL Compare to synch up the schemas, and then used SQL Data Compare when the old system was live. Then we took the system offline, ran another synch with only the changed data, and put the new system on line. Extremely easy."
