Table Diff is a database comparison tool that allows to easily compare and synchronize the data between two database tables. Table Diff currently supports only Microsoft SQL Server (2000, 2005, 2008 and MSDE) and runs only on Windows.

Table Diff

The reason why we first developed Table Diff is that we needed to compare the data between development and production environments to ensure that data created during the development process (e.g. new records in lookup tables) could be easily copied to the production environment.

There were already few tools out there offering this functionality, but none of them was either reliable enough or cheap enough. Most data comparison tools cost between 150 and 400 US Dollars, which we believe is not an amount of money any software developer or small business can afford spending for performing a data comparison task.

The reason for this is that comparing data is not something that people do very often. You might need to do this a couple of times per month, at most. Maybe there are special cases where you want to compare data more often that that, but we believe that most people won’t compare two tables very often, and therefore they are not willing to spend a fortune on a tool that will facilitate such task.

When developing Table Diff, we aimed at providing a great user interface, and a lot of flexibility.

For what concerns the user interface, we introduced something quite new, which consists in smart context menus that allow you to easily synchronize two values by simply clicking on them. This feature is very useful when you want to quickly synchronize values here and there and you are not really interested in saving a SQL script to be executed at later stage.

Context menus for quickly eliminating data differences

To achieve great flexibility, we introduced features such as custom column mapping (which allows you to map two columns having different name) and custom unique key definition (which allows you to define a custom unique key to use for the comparison).

This week we tested Table Diff with two relatively large tables containing 5,000,000 records each, and it worked like a charm. We’re very happy with it.