It took a little longer than expected but "By George I Think We've Cracked It!". Towards the end of last year a bunch of us went out to go ice skating and otherwise spending the company's money - which was nice, earlier in the morning I managed to fall off my bicycle and then when I was showing somebody how to ice skate I fell over and cracked a rib. All this pain because we were out celebrating a whole bunch of cool projects that had come to an end during the year. Not content with merely cracking a rib I then contrived to make it even worse by contracting a cold so that I was in agony every time I coughed. This cold I then kindly passed on to loads of people at the Christmas party because I'm a sharing kind of guy (I tried to pass on the broken rib but they relieved me of the baseball bat at the door). This all goes to show you that developing software is painful, no really it is, can I hear sniggering at the back?

Yes, developing software is painful but sometimes it's even more painful when you realise your new baby isn't as perfect as you thought. This was the case with SQL Data Compare 6, we thought we'd cracked comparing to backups, we were happy and I was in physical pain - very much like having given birth in fact :D. Then a man came along with a problem, a fairly small database was taking hours to compare, we couldn't believe it, we routinely run 1000's of database compares every night, each showing up a specific set of circumstances. So after much scratching of heads we managed to get to the bottom of the issue and now the compare finishes in a few minutes - 4000% speed up anyone? Pretty much every database backup comparison will see an improvement in speed although not to that extent obviously.

Not only did we speed up SQL Data Compare when comparing to backups but we've also added a little sweetener, there is now an option to compress the temporary space used. This means that not only can you set the RGTEMP environment variable to move the temporary files but also they can be up to 80% smaller. OK we're compressing so it's going to take slightly longer but we're only seeing a 5 to 10% slow down in testing during the comparison. But actually the generation of SQL can be quicker as we're nowhere near as disk bound as we used to be, got big processors and big databases this is the feature you'll like most about SQL Data Compare 6.1.

 What else did we do?

• Fixed some issues people were having with the synch wizard crashing
• Added a filter box for tables and views in the project configuration
• Try to not re-register backup files as the schema doesn't change that often does it :)
• WHERE clause failed if it ended with a comment --
• SQL Toolkit samples and help have been updated for version 6
• Healed 1 cracked rib

Hope you enjoy it out there, we're truly proud of what we've achieved.

Download SQL Data Compare here