Carly Meichen

15 August 2016

SQL Compare – why the UI?

Back in June, I shared the exciting news that SQL Compare 12 and SQL Data Compare 12 had been released to beta. It’s been a couple months and the good news is, both new versions are available as Frequent Updates. What we didn’t explain, though, is why we’re making the changes, and why we’re doing it now.

SEPTEMBER UPDATE: SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare 12 are now fully released. Download them free from our website, or read more about the updates in my new blog post: SQL Compare v12 has landed! New look, support, and foundations for the future

Improving the architecture

SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare have both had a user interface (UI) overhaul. This not only gives a consistent, modern look and feel to both tools, but we have a confession to make: we’ve been a bit selfish (although we promise it’s for the benefit of you guys, our users).

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.

What comes next?

As mentioned, SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare 12 are now both available as Frequent Updates, which you can enable from the Check for Updates dialog. But we still we want to hear from you. If you notice a bug, just let our Support team know on support@red-gate.com, or via the forums (SQL Compare | SQL Data Compare). If you have a feature request for v12, please let us know on our UserVoice pages:

SQL Compare UserVoice

SQL Data Compare UserVoice

The development team will be powering through the requests and we’ll aim to fully release v12 as the default build next month. I’ll follow up with another blog post then and tell you more about it.

From then on, we still want to hear from you. SQL Compare already supports a bunch of SQL Server 2016 features including Dynamic Data Masking, Row Level Security, and In-Memory OLTP tables, and we’re now working on adding further support. We’re hearing users are adopting Temporal Tables, for example, so that’s next on the list. Then we’ll be keeping a very close eye on UserVoice to make sure we’re delivering the valuable features you need more quickly.

So try SQL Compare & SQL Data Compare 12 for yourself and let us know what you think.