SQL Compare

Inbound:
Route 256: 5:35 NE 20St to Montlake Freeway Station
(XC Notes - g picking me up at Montlake so anything could happen after that! e x t r e m e ).

Reading: May edition of Surfer Magazine
Listening: Beck Guero

SQL Compare is a great tool. Marty & Co introduced me to it and I thought it would be great for db schema upgrade scripts which are always a pain to maintain. I was warned that it does have some caveats and you couldn't always trust the SQL it spat out but it just saved me a whole lot of hassle after I ran a pre-release db upgrade which resulted in a couple of different application failures.
I basically installed a clean version of the app/db, made sure that worked and then compared the db on the working machine to the db on the upgraded failing machine.
SQL Compare quickly told me how the schemas differed and generated the SQL for me to fix the problem.
SQL Data Compare then told me where metadata changes had gone wrong and again offered sql.
Problem solved.
And you're left with a bunch of scripts that you can ship back to whoever wrote the flawed upgrade script.

That's the good news, the bad news involves a MAPI Provider, multi-threading Outlook and a plate of spaghetti in between, but that's for tomorrow.

b.