Comments
3 comments
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As you posted in numbers - let me respond in kind
1. You can easily choose the location or your projects by clicking on the '...' button on the main project configuration page. This should be remembered by the UI so you can work for the place of your choosing, like My Documents as you want.
2. I understand what you're getting at with more visualizers although they can be quite time consuming to produce. Creating an architecture to allow people to write their own visualizers is neat idea although not something we're looking into at the moment. We've made quite a few upgrades to finding changes this version and I'm sure we'll keep improving those features as you suggest as time goes on.
3. You would not believe the length of the discussions we've had internally over colours and subtle changes in them. Glad you like the outcome.
4. I understand what you're after here although the filter is basically a WHERE clause with all the advantages and disadvantages that comes with that, i.e. not being able to filter on a column that *may* exist. I'll look into allowing filters to be set on multiple tables at once though as you're not the first person to ask.
5. Yes Sir! I get equally annoyed by programs not remembering settings ( have you noticed that we remember screen positions and sizes a lot better than before? )
6. That's a *huge* feature and can't really see that happening in the short-term. For that kind of control I think you'd need to look into using the SQL Toolkit.
PS Please try out compare to backup just to see if it works on your database, this is the primary reason for the Alpha to get as many eyes-on as we can - plus we'll send you an iPod Shuffle for your trouble ( times like this I wish I *didn't* work for Red Gate
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Hi Richard,
Thanks for the response. Here're some other thoughts in response.
1. I guess I'm saying I didn't find it to be a very intuitive or familiar way of getting at/importing/exporting files. I'd prefer to have everything be stored in a "My Projects"-like folder under My Documents. Have Import, which would let me browse and pick a file, which would copy it to "My Projects" and add it to the list, and have Export, which is essentially what you have for Save As. I don't recall if it is available on the main list of projects, but that'd be nice if not.., e.g., right-click and Export, or even Send in Email
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4. Glad to hear I'm not the only one; I think it'd be a huge usability win.
5. I can't say I've noticed, but that means you're doing the right thing.
I'll try to get to trying the compare to backup. In theory, it sounds like an awesome idea.
7. I noticed the checksum compare feature and tried it. I didn't notice perf improvement (on a large compare). Any reason to use/not use it? -
1. I think the ability to get at the directory via the "..." button on the main page makes it easy for people to import/export or right-click send to mail via the normal explorer extensions so I don't want to go re-inventing the wheel so I think we'll leave it at that for the moment. In essence that's all the first screen is now is a more detailed folder browser.
5. Just don't try it at 120dpi mode for the Alpha - I've fixed it now but all sorts of fun .NET 2 trying-to-be-too-clever scaling issues exist - especially on Vista
7. The checksum feature is a pre-check for very large tables to examine if the checksums are equal before attempting to compare. If you have very large tables that are quite often the same this can save huge amounts of time - although the comparison won't take place on that table therefore you can't browse it in the results either.
From the 5.4 help (this is a v5 feature too)
Use checksum comparison
Performs a checksum prior to comparison. The data is compared only if the checksums differ. Note that if the data differs only in text or image columns, the checksums will be identical and the data may be flagged incorrectly as identical.
On SQL Server 2000 db_owner permissions are required.
You cannot select this option if the Show identical values in results project option is selected.
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Also, along these lines, I think the files should go under current user My Documents -> Red Gate -> SQL Data Compare rather than app data simply because when rebuilding my box, I always remember to bring over my documents but not always stuff under app data. Or say when I want to send a project to a friend, it's kind of hard to drill into app data, but My Docs is right off the start menu, and I can just drag-n-drop it into my email from there.
2. Pivot is interesting, though I'm not sure I really see the value myself. What I'd like to see is friendlier visual compare functionality, such as different visualizers based on type (but selectable). For instance, if I have a character or text field, I'd like to pick a visualizer that is, e.g., HTML or XML, and have it do some formatting or maybe even render the HTML, highlighting differences. Similarly, if I have a date field, show me right next to the values what the difference is in time span. These kinds of things that help me quickly and meaningfully determine the difference in fields above and beyond straight textual diffing.
If you made this extensible, other devs could write their own visualizers to plug in, so maybe you wouldn't have to create them all. I'm thinking here of the VS 2005+ debugger visualizers.
3. Like the color coding. It helps a bit.
4. Filtering suggestion. One thing that'd be awesome is to be able to set a global filter, basically, when you see this column name in any table, here's the value I want for it. Concretely, say you have a language ID you want to filter on that recurs in many tables, and for now, you only want to compare X language. As it is now, I have to set that manually on each table (quite the pain). It'd be great to set it for all tables having the column (and would save me having to remember or find which ones do/don't have it).
5. On the final screen of the sync wizard, remember what I choose for the options. I hate having to deselect the recompare and save script options every time.
6. I don't know how feasible this would be, but if you know what the FK relationships are and know that inserting or deleting will fail if related rows are not selected, have an option to select dependencies as well (e.g., CTRL-CLICK means select change and dependent changes).
I think that's it. I like the new features in general. I think the compare to backup might come in handy some day, but not a need for me right now. Good stuff!