“There are so many SQL server database and structure comparison tools; may I know which one is better?\u201d. Well this is one of the most frequent questions, asked in SQL Server communities,therefore I decided to clarify this based on my experience and the products I’ve used so far. <\/P>
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I mainly use Red Gate SQL Bundle developer edition <\/A>for all DB related tasks and mostly for keeping my DBs in sync as I move up from dev to test to pre-prod and finally production, that\u2019s why I prefer Red Gate myself. Doesn’t mean it’s “better”, I think that’s a personal subjective thing, but there are two more possibilities that I’m aware of:<\/P> 1) Apex<\/A> <\/P> 2) DB Ghost<\/A><\/P> When I first used Apex SQL Edit, I was under the impression that their products are NOT as polished as they should be; it hangs a lot when it comes to huge databases and it hugs the resources a lot, so for the sake of this article, I took their products out of my benchmarking task. I\u2019ve mucked around with DB Ghost a lot recently and I have found it to be extremely reliable and it provides additional capability beyond comparison e.g. a rock-solid process to upgrade your databases (same as Red Gate),but still believe that from a developer’s perspective Red-Gate dose a better job than all its competitors. Below is only a feature comparison on Red-Gate and DB Ghost’s most popular product.<\/P> SQL Bundle Developer Edition (Red-Gate):<\/P> SQL Compare and Synchronization<\/STRONG>:Yes DB Ghost Professional Edition\u2122<\/P>
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SQL Data Compare<\/STRONG>:Yes
DTS Compare<\/STRONG>: Yes (That’s really handy if you are using DTS as an ETL tool)
Build Database from Script<\/STRONG>:Yes
Scripter<\/STRONG>:Yes
Extra<\/STRONG>:SQL Toolkit (APIs and command line tools to programmatically compare database objects are all exposed to the clients)
Price<\/STRONG>: http:\/\/www.red-gate.com\/dynamic\/shoppingcart\/QuoteProductOption.aspx?Product=SQLBundleDeveloper<\/A><\/P><\/BLOCKQUOTE>
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