Likelihood to Recommend As any other archiving solution, it is very well suited for environments with a large footprint of unstructured data (CIFS / NFS shares for user data) with a large amount of unused/old files and a need to keep those unused files for long term. In our scenario, due to some legal and contractual constraints we need to keep these files for 15 years. Archiving is a good choice to move the unused files to a cheaper storage tier, both on-prem or cloud.
Read full review We use SQL Compare to troubleshoot performance problems quite a bit since our data model is more like a template and not everything is 100% in sync and customization occurs between different client databases. We continually get pulled into performance issues and the developers will say Client A is performing different than Client B, why? Using SQL Compare, we usually find that one client was tuned and had indexes altered or added that weren't deployed to all clients or other objects weren't deployed correctly during the release. On the other hand, since our data model practices allow client databases to drift I tried to create a new golden image by trying to compare multiple databases based on the same data model and found it to be a very difficult process to complete using SQL Compare. SQL Compare gave me too much information and doesn't allow enough filtering to eliminate a lot of the noise.
Read full review Pros It gives you a good overview on user data: files age, sizes, file types, owners, etc. It is very flexible on the archiving policies. The data scans are really fast without affecting storage's performance. It has a great alternative to STUB files, which they call 'bread crumbs' (symlinks to files). Read full review Simple and easy comparison of database schemas and data. Differences can be copied or synced from one database to another with a click of a button. You can save "projects" so that you can easily rerun a previous comparison whenever you need to. It has a very simple, easy to learn interface. I've never needed to read any documentation or watch any tutorials in order to figure out how to do something. Read full review Cons Its licensing plan, which takes into account the amount of data analyzed instead of data transferred. Read full review Pricing.... I wish there was an inexpensive developer version I could buy for myself. Portability.... I would like to use it from a flash drive so I can use it where ever I am asked to work. Unbundled.... This may be available already but I dont' recall I can buy it cheaply as a stand-alone product. Its only part of the bundle - cost effectively. Read full review Usability It's a good tool to have, but becomes expensive to buy a user license for each developer.
Read full review Support Rating They have a great community website where you can search for answers but are also very responsive when it comes to direct support.
Read full review Alternatives Considered We have used
Veritas Enterprise Vault in the past, and besides its being a well-known player on the data archiving market, their tool is far more complex to implement, to manage and to keep working. Komprise is very robust and also very easy to implement, as most part of the job is done on Komprise side. The management console is delivered through a public URL as a SaaS platform. You only need to deploy a few VMs for scan/archiving/user access, which they call "Observer VMs." Komprise also doesn't uses Stub files, which is a poor implementation adopted by the competitor for file access. We had a lot of issues in the past with stub files. Komprise has implemented 'bread crumbs', which are CIFS symlinks to the files on the Observer. It is a very good implementation and it works really well.
Read full review I've used Visual Studio Database Projects for this type of work in the past with some success, but Redgate SQL Compare is faster, more transparent, and simply easier to use. Faster is self explanatory. More transparent, means that it's much easier to set up your desired options for schema change deployment scripts. Easier to use, It's really dead simple. Start a project, connect your source, connect destination, click compare.
Read full review Return on Investment It allowed us to free up some space on our main storage during a time where we didn't have the budget to expand it. It allows us to move unused data to a cheaper storage tier (Azure Blobs). Read full review Makes deployment fairly simple. Cutting our deployment time down. With the SDK, we can customize our deployment process very quickly and easily. History is not great, it does create scripts you can go back and see but it would be nice to have a quicker version view by object to save time. Read full review ScreenShots