Item: Redgate SQL Toolbelt Essentials
Rating: 10
Author: Aaron Smith

Overall Satisfaction with Redgate SQL Compare

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Redgate's SQL Compare to create our upgrade scripts for our application upgrades and deployments. We honestly couldn't do our upgrades without it! We make changes constantly to our database schema for our applications and managing those changes can be a hassle, let alone keeping track of what we need to put in the upgrade or new deployment scripts. Redgate's tools make this painless and worry free! Just check in your database changes into SQL and SQL Compare does the rest!

Pros and Cons

Pros

Extremely fast!
Compares from source control, not just physical databases. No need to keep copies of databases of varying versions laying around.
Command line tools integrate easily into automated build processes.
Even has plugins for products like Octopus Deploy!

Cons

Not the best at initial setups. Sometimes there are error messages that have no bearing on what the problem really is.
Documentation sometimes can be lacking, but their support team will make up for that.

Return on Investment

This single tool has saved us TONS of man hours every sprint. We don't need to worry about writing these change scripts anymore. Just set it and forget it!

Alternatives Considered

We haven't compared SQL Compare with other tools in a VERY long time because they are honestly THE BEST.

Other Software Used

Microsoft Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio IDE, Microsoft SQL Server

Likelihood to Recommend

If you have to keep track of database changes that then need to be sent out to production databases, this is the tool for you! Never again will you need to write complicated scripts and try to catch all the changes that were made in the database between versions. It will even handle data if you need it to!

Redgate SQL Toolbelt Essentials Feature Ratings

Comments

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Save yourself countless hours and headaches when deploying DB changes!!