Review: SQL Effects Clarity

SQL Effects Clarity is another entrant in the growing market of SQL Server add-on utilities - surely a testament to the continued popularity of Microsoft SQL Server. The product is essentially visual diff for SQL Server databases. It's quick and the user interface is well-implemented, with a nice balance between features and simplicity. Using this tool, you can easily track down differences between two versions of a database, which is often a sore point when deploying sites from one server to another.

In use, it's quite simple: choose servers and databases, supply credentials, and click the compare button. You can optionally limit your comparison to specific types of objects or even individual objects, and you can use the application's advanced options to specify which differences are worth worrying about. For instance, if the ordinal position of columns within a table isn't important to you, a couple of mouse clicks will eliminate that from the difference comparison. You have extremely fine-grained control over which properties to compare; by default, SQL Effects Clarity looks at everything, but you can focus on just the parts of the schema that are important to you.

After the comparison is done, you have a choice of displays: you can get a single treeview that lets you drill into objects with differences, or a side-by-side comparison of the two databases. Either way you can expand the tree down through object types and objects to find out exactly what changed from one database to the other. You also get several reports, including a detailed text report (that can also be exported as Excel, HTML, or PDF) and an XML format that's suitable for further post-processing by other applications. Couple the latter with the fact that this program can be driven entirely from the command line and you can see that it fits into an automated build process as well. SQL Effects Clarity doesn't offer any sort of reconciliation or other actions on the compared database; it's strictly an informational tool.

In addition to the commercial version, there's a free community edition that omits the command-line interface and the report exporting capabilities, but still offers the full range of comparison options. You can download the community edition or a trial of the full package here.