I’m excited to announce the beta release of SQL Compare & SQL Data Compare 12. This is the culmination of many months of hard work, and it gives us great pleasure to share the new look and feel, influenced and endorsed by our users. We want to use this beta period to get as much feedback from you, the SQL community, as possible. Try it out, or for more information on what’s new, read on.

Support for SQL Server 2016

First up, we’ve added support for SQL Server 2016. Hot on the heels of the SQL Server 2016 general release, SQL Compare supports:

• JSON syntax
• Columnstore indexes on memory optimized tables
• Dynamic Data Masking
• Row Level Security
• Stretch Tables

During this short beta period and beyond, we’ll be enhancing 2016 support – more to come on that later.

Brand new look and feel

As part of a joint effort to give all Redgate products a consistent design we’ve spent the last 6 months making sure that we absolutely get it right for our flagship products, and the industry’s most trusted comparison tools. You’ll find SQL Compare & SQL Data Compare cleaner, more intuitive, and a lot easier to work with. As is the beauty with a beta, we’ll be making incremental improvements and soon you’ll also be able to easily switch between your trusted Redgate tools.

Over 200 bug fixes and improvements

Since version 11, we’ve fixed well over 200 bugs as part of the UI rewrite and general improvements.

Get your hands on it

Try the betas for free. You can download the betas for both SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare here. You can install version 11 and 12 of the tools side by side. What’s more, if you typically launch SQL Compare or SQL Data Compare from within SQL Server Management Studio, it will recognise and launch version 12 for you.

Feedback

How are you finding the SQL Server 2016 support? Is there a particular 2016 feature you want to see SQL Compare & SQL Data Compare support next? What do you think to the new design? We’d love to hear from you. Try out the tools and send us your feedback.