In between the bouts of champagne for new product launches, eating the yoghurts and drinking the smoothies from the 'feel good fridge'. In between the free Thursday lunches and punting on the Cam we manage to get a surprising amount of work done here at Red Gate.

In fact I've been radio silent for the past couple of months mainly as we've been slogging away at the upcoming new version of SQL Data Compare 6. Now if you thought SQL Data Compare 5 was a step forward with it's amazing schema/table and column level mapping support ( I like that feature as I wrote it :) ), you'll be astounded as to what we've got for you in version 6.

OK we made a few mistakes in version 5. The project don't behave quite as you'd expect them to, the mappings you patiently created tend to disappear without warning and the very subtle (too subtle) colouring of the difference viewer makes it hard to spot differences in your table. Well you'll be pleased to hear we've fixed all that, projects are once again explicitly saved, you don't lose your mappings and OK the colours may be garish but at least you can find the differences in your objects.

Well we've got all that and more but what have we got that's truly new?

You ready?

Can you stand the suspense any longer?

Is this like one of those annoying emails that tell you to send it to all your friends or you'll get piles?

I hope not.

You will be able to compare to backups in version 6, without having to restore the backup file or even copy it to a local disk. You can of course even restore from a backup the contents of a table or even just an individual field much faster than copying the file from the network location to a SQL Server, restoring the database and the comparing the data. It'll even work on SQL Backup 5 compressed and encrypted backups.

I mean how seriously cool is that? We've loved working on this new feature and we're getting close to letting all you out there have a play with it. One of the reasons behind getting an early Alpha out of the door is that we really really want your input in to how it works and of course how it doesn't work. That's the whole point of Alphas really, we know there'll be bugs but we'd love your help in making this the best SQL Data Compare release ever.

If you can't tell by now I'm a little excited at the possibilities of this new version, it creates a whole new use for SQL Data Compare that we really couldn't have imagined before. If you want to get involved in the Alpha and subsequent Beta releases drop me an e-mail and I'll get back to you when the Alpha is released.

I love working on SQL Data Compare, the engine is a thing of beauty and the UI is pretty nice to work with too. This new feature brings together many technologies that we've become experienced in from SQL Compare, SQL Log Rescue (which is now free) and of course SQL Backup.

Hope you like it.