One benefit of being an Microsoft Access MVP is the fact that I get to interact with fellow MVPs and have access to certain promotions.
In the past couple of years, I have had the pleasure of communicating with Luke Chung, president of FMS Inc, and benefiting from his offer of NFR licenses of FMS’ software. The more I get the opportunity to try his software, the more I must say I am impressed.
I recently had the need to compare multiple back-end files to identify any differentiations between them.
At first I started thinking that the tasks wouldn’t necessarily be too complex to perform, even manually if need be. But further thought may me realize my initial conclusion was simply erroneous. It is obviously easy to identify missing tables, but identifying missing fields, fields that have changed, properties that have changed, and so much more, all sorts of minor tweaks that occur over the lifetime of a database quickly made any form of manual analysis unrealistic.
Then I remembered once noticing on Luke’s website a tool, Total Access Detective. I made a request to have a license and within a few minutes I had my copy to try out.
Installation
Firstly, the installation went smoothly. A simple executable that you launch, it ask you to install the software for just the current user or all users on the machine and then it installs. Nothing could be easier.
Usage
- Launch the ‘Database Compare’ module through the Start Menu
- Specified which objects to compare
- Specified which 2 databases to compare
- Let Total Access Detective do its thing!
I was actually quite surprised at the speed at which it was able to perform the in-depth analysis. In a matter of a minute or two, I had all my answers!
Once the analysis was complete, I simply clicked on the View, Filter and Print Comparison Results button and select which category of results I wished to review in detail.
The tool made very short work providing me with very detailed listing of missing objects, and differences between existing objects, even relationships.
Final Verdict
I am once again quite confident in putting my stamp of approval on this tool. If you are in a situation in which you quickly need to identify all the differences between multiple databases, FMS’ Total Access Detective will make short work of the job at hand!
Thank you Luke for allowing me to take it for a test drive. A very nice, easy to use and most importantly, effective and thorough tool!
It really is a good and useful product overall, but the module comparison is somewhat lacking. Side by side comparison of differing modules would be nice. When one clicks on ‘View Module Differences’ the results are displayed in a simple textbox with no scrollbars and no mouse-wheel scroll support. The cursor keys work for navigation but there is no warning when transitioning between one module’s worth of differences and the next when using up/down arrow or page up/down. Occasionally when scrolling between modules it will go into ‘select’ mode and everything will suddenly be inversely highlighted for no apparent reason, although tapping one of the arrow keys corrects this. And finally, once in a great while it will indicate a difference between two modules but upon examining the code I can’t find the difference (here again, a side by side display or adding some specific difference hilighting of some kind might help). Thanks for the review!