Embarcadero Change Manager

Introduction
Change Management is probably one of the most crucial tasks that developers and/or administrators face today. The risks for production systems associated with every new release or even patch are immense. And although these risks can never be completely eliminated, one can minimize them by an extensive testing period and a sophisticated change management workflow.

The purpose of this review is to explore how this essential task of change management in SQL Server environments can become more reliable, secure and effective by using a specialized tool that is designed exclusively for this purpose: Embarcadero Change Manager.

Embarcadero Change Manager
Embarcadero's Change Manager application suite is a sophisticated set of tools to compare data, schema, and configurations. Data can even be compared across database and RDBMS system boundaries. Change Manager supports multiple database platforms. The version tested supports the following platforms:

• IBM DB2 LUW 
• Oracle
• Microsoft SQL Server
• Sybase Adaptive Server

Installation, System Requirements, supported SQL Server versions
You can download a fully functional 14-day trial edition from the product's homepage, which you can find at http://www.embarcadero.com/products/changemanager/index.htmlEmbarcadero 

Embarcadero Change Manager can be installed on any machine meeting the following requirements:
Hardware:

• 1.2 GHz processor1 GB RAM
• 500 MB of disk space
• SVGA (2 MB) high resolution monitor (1024 x 768 or higher) with high colour (16-bit)

Software:
Change Manager is supported on all Windows platforms with the exceptions of Vista and 64-bit Windows XP. Internet Explorer (with SP1) is required to be installed before Change Manager can be installed. As an aside is Change Manager also available for the Linux operating system. While SQL Server itself obviously doesn't run on Linux, this version might be interesting for DBA`s and developers who need to connect to SQL Server from Linux.

The supported SQL Server versions are: SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005.



The installation of Change Manager is completely seamless and wizard-driven.



Once the installation has finished, Change Manager can be launched.



Upon the first launch of Change Manager a very handy feature kicks in: the "Import Datasources" dialog. This dialog only appears when Change Manager detects that other Embarcadero tools, such as DBArtisan and certain versions of RapidSQL are also installed on that machine. These tools can import data sources, which in turn relieves you of the time-consuming task of registering all datasources again and again in each tool.



As you can see from the above screenshot, 1 data source has been imported. Once this one-time import operation has finished, the Change Manager Workbench is launched: