Hello, internet. My name is Robert Pound, and I'm a product technologist at Quest. This video will demonstrate how to use the Compare tool to compare two database schemas in Toad Edge. It will also be important to understand the basics of the Compare tool if you plan to use version control or snapshots in Toad Edge, as the compared tool is used with those features as well. But they will be covered in another video.
It is assumed for this video that you have at least one connection established in Toad Edge, and you have two databases that you want to compare. So to get started, there are a couple different ways to actually do a compare in Toad Edge. The simplest way is to simply click and select two databases in the Object Explorer, and then, right-click on one of those objects, and choose Compare Schemas. This will open up a Schema Compare tab, and you can begin the process of comparing these two schemas.
You also can choose Compare from the top. I have the ability to either choose New, Previously-Run Compares, or Open a Comparison. I'm going to choose New Comparison. And you can name the comparison if you'd like demo-- pra-- dev-- let's say. And then you choose your source and targets. So in this case, these are the sources and targets that I was interested in. But if I wanted a different connection, I could either select one or create one.
And then choosing the database, I'm going to choose production on this side, and development on this side. And you have the ability to choose any of the objects that you have access to in the Object Explorer. So for this demo, I'm going to simply choose Tables and Functions. And then, you have some comparison rules. So if you want to ignore column order, you can. Or you can uncheck this, and it will look at the column order as a change. And you have more details if you want to look at Detail Settings, you can get into specific details about what exactly is ignored when comparing the two objects.
I'm going to go ahead and leave the defaults. And I'm going to go ahead and click Compare. And this will again open a comparison tab. This one is named, so we can open it up again if we so choose. The comparison tab itself is broken into two parts, the object portion and the script portion. So in the object portion, you have all visible objects for the comparison itself. And note that we did choose Table and Functions originally, but you can dynamically add and remove to the comparison.
So if I wanted to look at procedures, I can choose the checkbox, and now, there's a procedure that needs to be compared as well. So looking in the objects itself, you have a Re-Compare All. This is basically a refresh. It will go through and re-compare everything. You can choose to Save As if you wanted to name this something else. This allows you to navigate all Unread Comparisons. So if you do read them, and you want to treat them as unread, you can see this column here. I can right-click, and choose Mark as Unread, and then it will be able to navigate through again.
You can also generate a report. So as I have it right now, I can choose Generate a Report, and what this is going to do is create an HTML report. And we'll call this demo 1 and click Save. And I also have the option of opening the folder or the report once it's been generated. I'm going to go ahead and real quickly walk through the report. So right now, we were only comparising procedures and tables. So I have the ability to look at those. And looking at the comparisons themselves, it's going to give you an idea of what's in the comparison itself.
And this is, again, looking at what's in the script. So back to the tool itself, aside from the report, you also have the ability to generate an entire update script either for the target or the source. And you can generate this as a sequel file to the clipboard or in a worksheet. So if I was going to update the target, for instance, and I wanted to generate a script on the worksheet, it's going to take all the changes in this Compare tab and put it into one worksheet so you can run it. And run all the changes or modify it as you so choose.
And then, after that, you have filtering options, so you can filter out changes in the target source, changes in both the ignored portions. So you can filter them out, and you can see that the objects are going to change. And you also have the ability to change how the objects are displayed. So if you don't want any sort of hierarchy, right now, we have the object type and status. If you want just the status, you can see all the differences, all the in-source only, all the in-target only, or you could simply choose nothing. This will just be objects in a grid. I like this Object and Status because it breaks it out per object and per type of comparison.
And then, you can also search for objects. You can filter by the modified date, so you can obviously change the calendar here. And then you also can hide anything excluded. So if there was something in this comparison that I just want excluded from the comparison completely. So let's choose cities. If I choose Add to Exclude, then it will no longer be in the report. But if I want to see all the objects that have shown up, I can click Show Hide, and it will be an object that has been excluded. And as you can see, I've also