One of the questions I get quite a bit from customers is; do we have the ability to compare data and/or have the ability to compare DDL files to what’s currently in the DB2 catalog? As of V3.0 of TOAD for DB2 the answer is YES to both of these questions. A new feature called “Difference Viewer” allows you to compare table data, results sets, and various script files either file to file, or file to catalog. This feature is available for both LUW and z/OS environments. This is a very useful feature when you wish to verify the data in multiple copies of a table, or in many cases you may have DDL files saved and you want to be sure they match what’s actually in the catalog. Here are a couple of examples:
Example 1 – I have 2 copies of my employee table. I wish to verify the employee count is the same.
Select the table and send the data to the Diff viewer. Repeat this step for the second employee table. The diff viewer report will display the data side by with a summary at the bottom left of the window. In this example we can see that an additional employee was added to my second employee table.
This feature will also be useful when tuning queries. A queries result set can be sent to the Diff Viewer and when the query is modified and re-executed the new results set can be compared back to the original query to verify that the result set has not changed.
Example 2 – I have a DDL file that I wish to compare to what’s actually in the catalog to validate that they are in sync. This time we select “Diff Viewer as Script”:
When the Diff Viewer window opens the existing tables structure will appear on the left. On the right I then select the browse button and select the DDL file from my directory. The compare then verifies that the DDL I have saved does not match what is currently in the catalog.
As you can see there are many uses for this new feature. It can even be used to compare various TXT , HTML, XML, JAVA, .NET, PERL and many more types of documents. Have fun with this one!
See you next week!