When we started SQLServerCentral, there were originally 7 of us. We all decided to "invest" $50 to get the site going. With this seed money, we paid for a VM that hosted both SQL Server and IIS. This was enough money to run the site for 6+ months, and we set about building an online educational community and trying to raise some revenue by selling advertising.
Our first customer was Redgate Software, and the primary reason that we approached them was SQL Compare. At the time, one of my partners was a very happy customer of SQL Compare and thought that others should know about it. The rest is history, with SQLServerCentral, Redgate, and SQL Compare growing and changing across the years.
That was 18 years ago, and Redgate turns 20 this year, having grown and changed quite a bit in that time. In conjunction with the celebration, we're releasing SQL Compare v14, with a Linux command line version. That's something I could never have conceived up in 2001 when we started SQLServerCentral. There are plenty of other features in the new version, and I'm amazed at how useful the SQL Compare technology has become two decades after its first release.
SQL Compare is the industry standard technology for comparing databases. It powers our Database DevOps automation tools as well as many manual processes that tens of thousands of customers run every day. From synchronizing work between developers to detecting drift to building rollback scripts, SQL Compare ensures that many of us can find out the state of the various instances in our environments. It's a simple technology, but one that hundreds of thousands of people depend on every day.
When I first heard of this product, I never imagined that this would be as popular a tool as it has become. The idea of comparing two databases to find the differences was something novel at one point. Today, it's become an indispensable part of many developers' workday. Join me today and wish Redgate and SQL Compare a Happy Birthday, and tune into SQL in the City Streamed later on today, where we'll talk a little about SQL Compare and its history.
