The new SQL Data Compare beta is about to be released and I hope you all get a chance to have a good look at it and send me your opinions. There are a few features that we are quite proud of mostly of course these are surrounding our new Yukon support, SQL Server 2005 as now released. We’ve been working away internally on this for quite a while so we’re keen to get valuable feedback to make the upcoming release our best ever.

If you would like to join the beta program just send me or Neil Davidson an email and we’ll put you on the list.

The main features that I personally would like for people to have a look at are…

CLR Object type support in SQL 2005. XML type support and especially migration from existing XML fields you may have stored in [n]text fields or [n]varchar fields. Better collation support, there have been problems in the past with sort orders of varying collations in SQL Data Compare especially the older SQL_ collations that you may still use in your data. If you’ve been experiencing problems this release should fix them all for you. XML and partitioned indexes in SQL 2005. Large object SQL generation has been changed quite significantly to address users concerns so hopefully should produce quicker-to-execute SQL scripts.

This product just keeps getting better and better, I know because I write a lot of the code for the engine part of it :).

Have fun peepsicles.