This example illustrates how to select a number of individual tables for comparison when their names are not related in any way.

In this example, the databases contain the following tables:

• Product
• Supplier
• ProductCategory
• SpecialOffer
• Customer
• Order
• Invoice

You are interested only in the schema differences between the Product, Customer, Order, and Invoice tables in two different versions of your database, Customers1 and Customers2; you are not interested in any of the other tables, or any other objects in the databases.

Using the command line

To specify the list of tables to include, you use the /include switch. You could use an include switch for each table that you want to compare. However, this could get unwieldy if you have a long list of tables. Instead, you can use the pipe character ( | ) to separate the table names:

sqlcompare /db1:Customers1 /db2:Customers2 /Include:table /Include:table:\[Product\]^|Customer^|Order^|Invoice

where:

/db1:Customers1 specifies that you want to compare the database Customers1

/db2:Customers2 specifies that you want to compare the database Customers2

/Include:table specifies that you want to compare only tables; you do not want to compare other objects such as views, stored procedures, and so on. If you omit this argument, SQL Compare compares all tables that match the second /Includeswitch and all other objects in the databases.

To specify more than one object type for inclusion, use multiple /Include switches. For example, to include only tables and views, enter:

/Include:table /Include:view /Include:table:\[Product\]^|Customer^|Order^|Invoice

specifies that you want to compare only the tables that have a name that includes the strings [Product], or Customer, or Order, or Invoice

You must include the brackets ( [ ] ) in the string; if you specify the argument without the brackets, /Include:table:Product, theProductCategory table is included because it contains the string Product. The full SQL Server table names are qualified by the schema name in SQL Server 2005/2008, and include brackets. For example:

[dbo].[Product]
[dbo].[ProductCategory]

and so on. Therefore, the brackets indicate that you are specifying the full table name. To include the owner (or schema) name in the regular expression, you also need to escape the dot ( . ):

/Include:table:\[dbo\]\ .\[Product\]

The pipe character ( | ) in a regular expression is interpreted as a logical OR. The character must be escaped by the caret character ( ^ ), to prevent the operating system shell from interpreting it as the pipe operator.

Using XML

You can use XML like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<commandline>
	<database1>Customers1</database1>
	<database2>Customers2</database2>
	<sync/>
	<include>Table</include>
	<include>Table:\[Product\]|Customer|Order|Invoice</include>
</commandline>

To execute the comparison using the XML file, enter the following command, where XMLFileName is the name of the XML file:

sqlcompare /Argfile:XMLFileName.xml