I’m off to Live 360 today in Orlando, flying early (I should be somewhere over Texas or Louisiana by now), and busy at the event.
So you get to re-read Boring or Scripting, which describes a bit about my career. I don’t get bored, I find ways to keep busy and make my job better.
Recently a customer asked if SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare can be used with a read-only database as a source. It’s a good questions as I’ve seen some tools that create temp tables or do some other work in a source database, which might cause problems. Certainly someone running SQL Compare against production would want to ensure it works as a read-only application.
This post will look at SQL Compare with a read-write database but a user account with read-only access. My previous post looked at a read-only database.
This is part of a series of posts on SQL Compare.
I’ve got a couple of databases that I use for Compare demos. In this case, compare5_prod and compare1. The compare5_prod is set to read write, which is normal.
I created a new login, which will default to the Compare5_prod database.
This login maps to a user, which has read only rights in the database.
In my compare setup, I’ll use this login to connect to the database.
As you can see below, Compare works fine, even reading the various system metadata tables:
This works because SQL Compare is not writing anything to the database. We read metadata and then process that in-memory on the client before returning the results.
You can see this also works in SQL Data Compare. Here’s the connection:
And here are the results
This was a very simple example, but I find that clients always would prefer to see examples already completed and proof that something works when they are evaluating software. Hopefully this helps answer this question.
SQL Compare is an amazing tool that millions of users have enjoyed for 25 years. If you’ve never tried it, give it an eval today and see what you think.
I am off to Live 360 today, on my last trip of the year. I’m excited to deliver two presentations tomorrow (VSTH03 and VSTH12), but a little sad this is a very quick trip. I’m coming back Friday, so in total I’ll be in Orlando for about 43 hours, I need to sleep, so my time is less than that.
I haven’t been to this conference in a few years, but I’m looking forward to going back, even though it’s a short trip. I always enjoy these multi-tech conferences because I get the chance to learn something completely out of my area. In my limited time, I’ll learn about Shift Left DevOps security, because it’s interesting and Brian is a friend. I will also try to hit a GraphQL session since I know nothing about it and it works with various db stores. If I can, I might do some prompt engineering as well.
If you’re at the event, I’ll try to swing by Wed afternoon and be there all day Thur. Feel free to stop me and say hi.
A story from Tim Grover, who was Michael Jordan’s trainer when he was with the Chicago Bulls. I don’t know this is true, but I saw this story posted and I like it (and don’t like it).
“After every game, I used to ask Michael one question: 5, 6, or 7? As in, what time are we hitting the gym tomorrow morning? And he’d snap back the time, and that was it. Especially after a loss, when there wasn’t a whole lot else to say.
No discussion, no debate, no lame attempt to convince me he needed the morning off. ‘Are you good?’ ‘I’m good.’ ‘See you in the morning.’ And the next morning, at whatever time he’d decided, he’d awaken to find me standing outside his door.
No matter what happened the night before—good game, bad game, soreness, fatigue—he was up working out every morning while most other guys slept. Interesting how the guy with the most talent and success spent more time working out than anyone else.”
Grinding away, getting better at your craft, is something that all of us can do. Whether we want to or not is a separate story.
There aren’t excuses for continuing to work on your craft and it takes regular attention. It requires some dedication and commitment to improve.
It’s easy to take this to far and think the routine of every day or every week is important. It’s also easy to drive yourself too far. If you want to be the rest of the best, then you need this drive.
If you don’t want to be the best, but just be really good, then you need to do this often, but give yourself a break at times when life gets in the way.
Voice of the DBA 