Enhancements in the object compare tool in Toad for DB2

Hi, this is Jeff Podlasek with Toad DB2 Development. Today I'm going to demonstrate the enhancements we've made to the Object Compare feature in Toad for DB2 version 6.0. We made these enhancements for both DB2 LUW and DB2 z/OS. With this 6.0 release of Toad for DB2, we have replaced the schema compare feature with our object compare feature. Object compare has been around in the product for many years now, and has become way more powerful than the old, simple schema compare feature. You can now still perform the schema compares, but you have to use the object compare feature, and I'm going to demonstrate that for you right now. So I have Toad up and running. And I've got an Object Explorer up and running, connected to a DB2 LUW database. You could be connected to a DB2 z/SO subsystem, but for this demo I'm going to use DB2 LUW. To invoke the compare feature, just click on the Compare button on the top panel and it brings up the initial screen that allows you to select your source and target. And my target and source are going to be the same, so I'm going to click Next. Now, to do a schema compare, I'm going to select Schemas in my Object Explorer and then select and drag my source schema over to the object compare feature. And what Toad will do, as you see, it exploded and retrieved all of the database objects that had the stage qualifier up for the schema. And so now I'm going to click Next. And to compare objects of that schema to another schema, you simply choose a different target schema. So here I'm just going to choose a prod schema as my target and click Next. And Toad's going to compare all the source objects against all the target objects and then come up with a summary report. And you can see that a lot of the tables from source to target are equal, and only one has been flagged as different. So that's how you could perform a schema compare using our object compare feature. And another set of enhancements that were added to this object compare feature is we added a lot more options. We received a lot of feedback from our customers telling us that they love this object compare feature, but they have many differences in their test and prod environments that they wish to ignore when doing their comparisons. So we've implemented a bunch of new advanced options that allow users to ignore many things. For example, you can now say you want to ignore tablespaces when you're doing your comparison. You could also ignore the compress keyword. So if our customers use compression in production but not in their small test environments, so now you could ignore that clause. You could also ignore range partition values. Again, some of our customers in their prod environments have different range partition values than they will in their small test environments. You can ignore code page differences. And for DB2 LUW, you could ignore the collect statistics clause in indexes. IBM introduced the ability to have a collect statistics clause in their create index statements. And some customers use those in prod environments and not their tests, so now they could ignore those. I'm just going to run another simple compare. I'm going to shut this comparison down. And what I'm going to do now is just bring up a list of tables and select one, right-click and send that to the object compare feature. And I'm going to use the same target and I'm just going to map my source schema of administrator to my target's schema of target. Click Next, and you'll see that this table which has partitioning has been flagged as being different because the partitioning values indeed are different. But if I go back and if I specify that new option to ignore the partitioning values during comparison, I click that on, I click OK, I click Next. We do the comparison again, but this time we ignore the range differences. These tables will be treated as equal, and they will not be generated when we generate a sync script. So in summary, you can still perform schema compares using our object compare feature which is way more powerful-- its powerful name mapping, wildcard mapping. And it has a lot more ignore options that we've added in this release.