Item: Redgate SQL Toolbelt Essentials
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Redgate SQL Compare

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

SQL compare is used in the department mainly during releases and the occasional issue finding (differences between live and dev environments).
Years before we did use a source control solution, but that caused more problems than it solved, so I use this software to deploy DB changes from our dev to live platforms. It's more manual, but it gives me the opportunity to review the differences, and from time to time question the choices of the changes!

Pros and Cons

Pros

It allows you to set up projects for repetitive comparisions.
It organises object differences very well, with filters and searches available on top.
Redgate displays the differences between objects very clearly at script level.
It's created deployment scripts that you can either run yourself, or complete using the application.

Cons

So far so good. I have to be honest, it's not a complicated application, and so far hasn't caused me any issues or to question the choices of the developers!

Return on Investment

The top benefit is time-saving in deployment. While it's still a manual process overall, it's so much better than doing this with SSMS and Winmerge!

Alternatives Considered

I was familiar with the quality of Redgate's products at the time of making the purchase decision. I checked out a trial version to make sure I could achieve what I wanted from the application, but I never made comparisons with other vendors tools on this occasion. Pricing-wise, it wasn't worth the effort to spend time making alternative comparisons.

Likelihood to Recommend

Redgate is just a massive timesaving tool for releasing changes from our dev to live platforms. Being able to choose all the objects that need scripting out to alter, create, and drop statements with the click of a few buttons, taking into consideration all the dependencies, is brilliant. Coupled with that, the ability to review the differences along the way for last-minute issue spotting is hugely helpful.

Redgate SQL Toolbelt Essentials Feature Ratings

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