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SchemaDrift – Database Schema Differences – My Weekend Project

This weekend I had some spare time, so I started coding on a new project on Friday night. This project is something that I intend to include in the next release of Database Health Monitor. THis project allows users to compare the database schema between two SQL Server databases.

As you read this, consider two questions that I will ask again at the end of the post, I would really love some feedback:

  1. Would you use this?
  2. Would you be interested in helping me test it out as an early release?

This was inspired by working with clients who need to compare the schema between different SQL Servers, either between multiple production servers with the same schema, or between test and production servers.

I know there are other tools out there that do this, but its not easy to convince a client to purchase 3rd party tools, so I am left not having a good tool to do this.

This is just a start, I still have a great deal of work to do, but its the foundation for me to build upon.

How it works:

  • Connect to a SQL Server and choose a database to compare (known as the source).
  • Connect to another SQL Server and choose another database to compare against (known as the destination).
  • Click the compare button.
  • The schema is then compared between the two servers (Tables, Sprocs, Functions, Users, Indexes, etc…)
  • Results are sorting into 4 categories.
    • Matched between the two servers.
    • Exist on both servers, but something is different.
    • Only on the Source Server.
    • Only on the Destination Server.
  • You can the browse the code behind those objects, and see the differences.

Database Schema Drift The Demo:

To start with we just run the program.

SchemaDrift Database Schema Comparison Diff

Next we click the connect button under the Source Server section. For the first server I am going to connect to a SQL Server 2008 R2 instance with SQL credentials.

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Database Health Monitor – Historic Waits

With the recent release of Database Health Monitor Version 2.0 I have decided to focus on of blogging about the features and benefits of the Database Health Monitor application. There are some incredibly valuable features that are often overlooked. The purpose of this blog series is to present some of the features of the product.

If you haven’t tried Database Health Monitor, you can download it at http://DatabaseHealth.com/download. It is completely free.

Historic Waits

The Historic Waits section of Database Health monitor is in my opinion the single most valuable part of the entire product. Other vendors sell products similar the Historic Waits feature for $1500 to $2000 per SQL Server instance, making it cost prohibitive for many.

The way that Historic Waits works is that it installs a small monitoring database on a SQL Server, that can be the same SQL Server you are monitoring, or it can be a separate SQL Server just to keep track of performance.

Over time data is collected in this monitoring database that allows you to then step back in time to see what was happening with the SQL Server at a specific point in time. For instance, if you have Historic Monitoring enabled, if someone comes to you and says “The SQL Server was slow and having problems at 2:00am yesterday”, you have the ability to track down what was happening at that point in time.

The main Historic overview page shows Waits, Plan Cache Hit Ratio, Page Life Expectancy and CPU Load over time.

HistoricOverview1

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