Data comparison is a difficult and resource-intensive process. For convenience, this process can be divided into several steps.
First, you should compare tables from one database on one server with the database on the other server. You should choose columns for data comparison, and also choose a column that will be a comparison key.
The next step is to choose all data from these tables or some specified part of the data.
The third and the most important step is comparison of the two tables by the selected comparison key itself. During this process the status of each record is set to “only in source”, “only in target”, “different”, or “equal”.
The final steps of the data comparison process are including records to the synchronization and synchronization itself. During these steps records needed for synchronization are chosen, update script is created, and after that the script is executed.
You can read a detailed description of the comparison process here.

Now let’s look at the third step (data comparison) thoroughly.

There are several ways of data comparison that differ only by the side where data comparison is going to be performed – on the server side or on the client PC.

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In dbForge Studio for MySQL you can find Data Compare, a tool which allows you to compare and analyze tables data in databases, for example, to check that data in the synchronized databases are identical. Besides, it  allows synchronizing the data differences to get identical databases. The following picture illustrates comparison and synchronization of two MySQL databases.

Data Comparison Workflow

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Recently, we were updating our own database used for dbForge Data Compare for MySQL testing. I wanted to add several tables with data, using a dump file of one of the tables.

Problem
But how to drop a millisecond part in every pasted string, I mean a date like ‘2006-12-24 15:35:19.658′ should be replaced with ’2006-12-24 15:35:19′ one?

Any simple Find and Replace functionality won’t help, as I don’t know what to find and with what to replace.

Solution

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Recently, one of our customers asked us how to synchronize large databases if the size of the generated synchronization script couldn’t be opened by dbForge Data Compare for SQL Server for editing. He tried to synchronize his large database, but the generated synchronization script (Table Data Update Script of all tables) was of a great size, so the program could not open it and recommended direct execution. However, the user wanted to review the script and edit it before execution.

Such cases are quite common, so here is the solution we recommend.
If you have a big database, synchronize it in three stages:

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Introduction

Devart Company has launched a new product line for working with SQL Server databases. Recently we have released a beta version of the first product in this dbForge for SQL Server product line – dbForge Data Compare for SQL Server. It is a tool for data comparison and synchronization.

Product’s key features

Nowadays there is a wide variety of data comparison and synchronization tools. It takes time and efforts to make a reasonable choice. We have analyzed a number of such products and found that Data Compare for SQL Server stands out against competitors thanks to a number of key features.

In this article, I am going to tell what exactly distinguishes Data Compare for SQL Server from dozens of similar tools. The key features list of Data Compare for SQL Server includes the following:

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