SQL Schema Compare with Visual Studio (A complete Guide)

Introduction

When you're working on your Dev Database, an urgent issue comes along, and you instantly solve it by changing Scheme in the Staging Database or Production Database :3, few more these type of patching and you're completely out of sync!

A lot of paid alternatives are there like SQL Data Compare by RedGate, but my first choice is Visual Studio's SQL Data Tools. In the following article, I tried to image-describe the steps for SQL Data Tool.

Like I said before, there are lots of handly DBAtools out there to compare Schema between two DB Sources. I would like to discuss how you can compare two SQL Server DB with Visual Studio.

Make sure you have SQL Server Data tools checked while installing Visual Studio.

Comapre Scema

Open VS and select SQL Schema Compare under tools > SQL Server> New Scheme Compare

Then, Select Source and Destination Database Source with Catalog name

After Selecting the Source and Database, click on "Compare"

Then the comparison begins and you wait for it to complete. The bigger the DB with respect to Schema, the more time it takes.

After the comparison is complete, you can see the changed items and added items.

Click on the items you want to move to Source to Destination :D

Click Shift + Alt + G to generate Scripts to update Schema from Source to Destination

The generated scripts will be open in a separate window

You can Run from Visual Studio Or copy-paste the Script and Run in your destination db SSMS.

If you run from SSMS, make sure SQLCMD in enabled.

Conclusion

In today's article, we have seen how we can easily compare schema across different server hosted same Database. Visual Studio's build in SQL Schema comparison is a free tool for this compared to other paid alternatives.

Comments

Most Loved Posts

SQL Insider 01 : An Anatomy of SELECT

Introduction When we write queries, we tend to think about the internals very little. In the new series of SQL Insider, I shall try to demonstrate what your SQL Server has to go through when you write a specific query, more specifically a specific operator. In the series, we shall try to cover all the important operators in SQL. Our today's SQL participant in SELECT. SELECT With the SELECT query, we can select one, some, or all the columns of a SQL table. The typical syntax for SELECT is like this SELECT * FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail SELECT sod.OrderQty, sod.UnitPrice FROM Sales.SalesOrderDetail sod Please note that we will not be dealing with WHERE clause in today's episode. Database We will be using AdventureWorks2019 Database for the demonstration Important Configuration We will be setting STATISTICS IO ON like this - SET STATISTICS IO ON; SET STATISTICS IO ON ; We will turn on Actual Execution Plan to examine the query SQL Insider Let's sta...

How to Backup SQL server like Batman: The Ultimate SQL DBA Guide

Slow SQL Server : What we should NOT do

Try to list the best practices of SQL Server. It will require a heck of a time. Try to list the Bad Practices and it will require more than the best practice list , of course, probably you’ll end up getting frustrated . (seeing all the oops configurations and its effect on SQL Server )

How to deal with Slow SQL Server due to Autogrowth issue

Why you should not stick to SQL Server’s default Initial file size and autogrowth We hear a lot of these statements : My SQL Server is running slow My Production DB was fine when we started, But it is staggeringly slow now My Business end users are frustrated to wait too long Well, there are lots of reasons why your SQL Server might be slow. Setting the Autogrowth option to default is definitely one of the vital ones which we seem to ignore most of the time. Slow SQL Server and Tortoise SQL Server provides you with some default settings for autogrowth when you install it for the first time. These default cases are defined with increment by 8MB or by 10%. You need to change it to suit your own needs. For Small application, this default value might work but as soon as your system grows, you feel the impact of it more often. What Happens SQL Server Files needs more space SQL Server Requests the Server PC for more space The Server PC takes the request and asks the SQL request...

Intelligent Query Processing in SQL Server 2019 Big Data

SQL Server 2019: Intelligent Query Processing SQL Server 2019 ships with some brand-new features. Many of these features are targeted for Big Data Solutions. No wonder in that, since the world is moving faster towards Big Data and it is absolutely necessary to cope up with that. Today we will discuss one such feature called Approximate Query Processing. Approximate Query Processing SQL Server ships with Intelligent Query Processing out of the box with SQL Server 2019 installation. Approximate Query processing is a part of Intelligent Query Processing. Things we will be covering in this article – Understand the need for Approximation with Case Study Case Study 1: Railway Case Study 2: e-commerce How to use Approximate Query Processing Demo Code for Comparing Performance Results Limitations When to avoid Approximate Query Processing Understand the need for Approximate Query Processing Before using any technological feature, we must understand why we should use it? Should we jus...

How to generate C# Class from SQL Server Table

C# Class from SQL Database Table There are multiple ways you can generate a C# class from your Database Table. We will be covering the following topics in today’s article. Generate Class with foreign key relation Generate Class with only entities Generate Class with foreign key relations For this we can simply use Entity Frameworks EDMX update feature which will generate our C# class from Database Tables. The output from EDMX will contain foreign key relations which we can see from the virtual interfaces like this - public partial class AssetItem { [System.Diagnostics.CodeAnalysis.SuppressMessage("Microsoft.Usage", "CA2214:DoNotCallOverridableMethodsInConstructors")] public AssetItem() { this .AssetItemDepreciations = new HashSet<AssetItemDepreciation>(); this .AssetTaxMappings = new HashSet<AssetTaxMapping>(); this .AssetVatMappings = new HashSet<AssetVatMapping>(); ...

Why not use Select * in SQL Server

Select * We often use the Select * to fetch data from tables of SQL Server.

6 Letters for SQL Disaster Emergencies : RPO and RTO

SQL Server Performance : OR vs UNION ALL

When writing queries, we seem to care less about the performance issue at first. Our first goal is to make the output right. When we get the correct output, we then move on to the next phase we call performance tuning. Today we will try to understand what happens when you write OR in your query. We will do the same thing with UNION ALL and try to understand which one seems to perform better.

SQL Server Pain Relief

Search This Blog