Setting Defaults for New SQL Compare Projects from Blog Posts - SQLServerCentral

Recently I wrote about ignoring comments in SQL Compare. That seems like something I want to do in all my projects, so I went looking for how to set this as a default. It wasn’t obvious to me, but since I can ping the Redgate Software developers and support staff, I found an answer for this post.

If I start SQL Compare by clicking a project, it opens and my settings are there. When I start SQL Compare, it brings up the New Project dialog, shown here:

However, if I don’t want a new project, and close that, I have a basic interface. Going through the menus, I don’t see any way to set global options.

There are Application Options, but these aren’t anything to do with projects.

However, I realized that I missed something a support person pointed out to me. On the options tab for any project is a button that says “Save as my defaults”.

I can set things from any project, or I can click the “My Projects” button in the toolbar, which gives me a list of projects (I don’t save many).

At the bottom of this is an “edit” button, which opens the familiar project dialog. I can click Options from there and see options.

When I do that, I can now set the items that I care about. The Ignore Comments is one, but there a few others I think cause issues. I do want to ignore encryption objects. I shouldn’t have the same ones  in dev as prod, so I’ll check that. Others:

• Use database compat level (likely better than server version these days)
• Online = ON
• Ignore identity seed and increment (this could get changed)
• Ignore WITH ENCRYPTION

I can then click the “Save as my defaults”. This will ensure new projects have these options. If I have old projects I want to update, I can always click the “My defaults” in the project to load what I’ve saved. This animation shows how the button works.

Now I can easily ensure that projects work as expected on my machine. Unfortunately, these defaults are stored in the registry, so this is a client by client basis, but you can ensure all your projects are set up the same by default.

SQL Compare is a fantastic product to make it easy to see what has changed in a database. If you’ve never used it, give it a try today.

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