Table Diff can be used in different scenarios. Following, are the most important ones.

As part of a website deployment process

If you have a website which uses a database, chances are that you have at least two separate databases: one for development and another for production. As part of the development process, you often update the data in the development database. This is particularly true for lookup tables. You might, for example, decide to add some records to a table, and also to update some existing records of the same table.

Before deploying the new version of your website to the production environment, you want to make sure that the live database includes the data changes that you have introduced to the development database.

You can do this manually, if the data is not much and if you’re okay with the possibility of introducing errors as part of the manual data entry process. But, if numerous changes were done, or you do not want to risk introducing errors as part of the manual data entry process, then you should use Table Diff.

Table Diff will quickly identify and highlight the data differences between the table in the development database and the one in the production database. Once the data differences are highlighted, you can generate and execute a SQL script which will remove those data differences.

To migrate data from different versions of Microsoft SQL Server

Table Diff can be used to copy data from one version of Microsoft SQL Server to another version of Microsoft SQL Server. This is a common scenario when an upgrade of the SQL Server is required. Following are the steps that can be performed to migrate data from one version of SQL Server to another:

  1. Create the database and its tables on the new instance of Microsoft SQL Server (e.g. Microsoft SQL Server 2008);
  2. For each table on the old database (e.g. Microsoft SQL Server 2000), compare the old table with the new table using Table Diff;
  3. Generate a unidirectional synchronization script using Table Diff;
  4. Execute the synchronization script generated by Table Diff using Table Diff itself, Microsoft Query Analyzer, SQL Server Management Studio or any similar tool.

To facilitate testing

Quality assurance testers love to test an application or a website using “real” data. With Table Diff you can easily copy some of the data located on the production databases to the development or test databases.

Table Diff makes the process of copying data from the production databases to the test or development databases very fast. This allows you to regularly update the development or test databases with clean and real data from the production databases.

To troubleshoot replication issues

When database replication fails, Table Diff can be used to identify and eliminate data differences between database tables. Table Diff allows the database administrator to identify data differences between replicas and to eliminate those differences.

To regularly backup a database table

There is often a need to backup the data stored into a single table. The reasons for this are multiple, including backup policies and auditing requirements. Table Diff can be used to regularly take a snapshot of a database table. Following are the steps that can be performed to backup a database table:

  1. Create a backup table having the same attributes as the source table;
  2. Compare the source table against the backup table using Table Diff;
  3. Generate a unidirectional synchronization script to copy all records from the source table to the backup table using Table Diff;
  4. Execute the generated script using Table Diff, Microsoft Query Analyzer, SQL Server Management Studio or any similar tool.