Do you know if anything out of the ordinary is happening with your databases? Is one of your database applications secretly destroying your data?

We probably do not ask this question enough, if at all. Usually we can spot oddities in our data through the application interfaces they are tied to, but not always.

What if you could quickly compare changes in your database, across tables, on say a weekly basis? What if this only took a few minutes of your time?

Well there seems to be a number of tools out there handling just this thing. One tool that seems to work fairly well for SQL Server is SQL Examiner Suite.  This software will compare schemas and data.  It is the BeyondCompare for databases.  One of the cool features it the ability to compare backup files, which is very useful since you can quickly see where schemas or data have changed.

One way to actually use BeyondCompare to compare your database tables is to generate the insert scripts for the tables in your database and store versions of it every so often.  Then you can compare the individual tables (or the version folders the scripts reside in) as text files in BeyondCompare to help spot issues in your data.  BeyondCompare is a must have tool if you are a data manager or software developer, so using BeyondCompare in this capacity will help you become a power user quickly.