Troubleshooting Data Compare Issues

  • Article

You might encounter the issues in this topic when you compare the data in two databases.

Tables Missing from the List of Tables to Compare

Tables and views will appear in the list of tables that you can compare only if all the following conditions are true:

  • Tables must have matching column names that have compatible data types.

    Names of tables, views, and owners are case-sensitive. For more information about schemas, see Compare and Synchronize Database Schemas.

  • Tables must have the same primary key, unique index, or unique constraint.

  • Views must have the same unique, clustered index.

  • You can compare a table with a view only if they have the same name and schema definition.

Differences in sql_variant Types

You must inspect the Data Update script to identify differences in the metadata for sql_variant types if the values in the columns are the same. The Different Records list does not reflect these types of differences.

Error Appears When You Compare Japanese Unicode Data

You can specify a collation for your SQL Server database or for the columns in a table in your database. However, the "Locale is not supported" error appears in the Error List window if you try to compare data that uses one of the Japanese_Unicode_Qualifier collations (where Qualifier might be BIN, CS, CI, or CS_AS_KS_WS). SQL Server supports these collations, but .NET Framework does not.

Note

To resolve this issue, you can change your database or column collation from Japanese_Unicode_Qualifier to Japanese_Qualifier, where the value of Qualifier is the same. For information about how to change the database collation, see Setting and Changing the Server Collation on the Microsoft Web site. To change a column collation, you can modify the table definition if the column is not referenced by a computed column, an index, distribution statistics, a CHECK constraint, or a FOREIGN KEY constraint.

See Also

Tasks

How to: Compare and Synchronize the Data of Two Databases

Concepts

Compare and Synchronize Data in One or More Tables with Data in a Reference Database