Automated Data Comparison?

  • Hey guys,

    I'm sure this is something some of you have had to do from time to time, so I'm wondering if there's any built in functionality in SQL which could help...

    Essentially I'll be creating a data set once a day which will be dumped to a table. You would expect to see:

    Small amounts of growth day on day (less than say 1%) row count wise

    Overall colum data coverage to be very similar (again, slight growth or reduction)

    Some values to change but not massively.

    I was about to create a series of important things I wanted to check but I wondered if there was any kind of 'sql compare' type thing (except for the actual SQL compare tool - that's for code!), which could have thresholds set and then trigger alerts when theyr'e broken.

    Probably a massive long shot but I thought I'd ask since it's multiple tables and quite a few columns I'd be wanting to evaluate.

  • This may help:

    http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms162843(v=sql.105).aspx

    This is the native tablediff utility that shipsd with SQL server.

    MCITP SQL 2005, MCSA SQL 2012

  • Thanks, that looks like it could be useful! I did some searching after I posted, I see red gate do do a sql DATA compare, which I'm currently road testing too.

    In reality I think I'll just have to do the leg work and dig into the data and create a series of logical tests and comparisons but I'll certainly give tablediff a look 🙂

  • Change Tracking or Change Data Capture also might be useful, depending on your specific requirements.

    SQL DBA,SQL Server MVP(07, 08, 09) "It's a dog-eat-dog world, and I'm wearing Milk-Bone underwear." "Norm", on "Cheers". Also from "Cheers", from "Carla": "You need to know 3 things about Tortelli men: Tortelli men draw women like flies; Tortelli men treat women like flies; Tortelli men's brains are in their flies".

  • Thanks for the replies guys, on reflection I think a 'meta table' of the collected tables of results might be the way to go, something which can be built up on a day by day basis and compared to the previous days results sets, things like sums, averages, row counts, max/mins etc.

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