Compare objects between two (related) projects

[techfest]

Hi everyone

I am trying to find a way of generating a report which shows a comparison of objects between two projects.

I believe that there is something available in the SDK to do this, but I was wondering whether anyone has attempted to do something similar by querying the MetaData directly using SQL.

Any advice greatly accepted!

Many thanks in advance

 

[chael]

This can be done via the SDK...you could also simply use the documentation tools within Desktop to generate information about the schema, individual object definitions, etc. and do this seperately for both projects.

If you have enterprise manager you can also do some querying there....the EM tables are ETL'd from both the stats tables and the MD tables, which makes reporting against them much easier that reporting directly against the MD...which takes us to the next point: you CAN build a project going against the metadata...you just have to know the object type IDs, etc. and you'd have to build a project from scratch, etc.

Before you dig into the SDK or building your own project see what the out of the box utilities can do for you...let me know if you need help locating these features.

Chael

 

[techfest]

Thanks very much for responding to my question. I have Stats, but unfortunately only for one of the 2 projects I'd like to compare, which leaves me with querying MD directly in SQL, or as you say, generating a new project (or adding the extra project to statistics).

In terms of the documentation, is there any way of saving the resulting documentation to Excel, for example, rather than in an html format?

techfest

 

[nlim]

it's real frustrating that you can export schema objects to excel (via export schema), but not the application objects like reports etc...

 

[entaroadun]

How detailed of a comparison do you need? If it is information covered in the HTML doc, I would recommend taking the doc and writing a quick and dirty process to parse it to get what you need.

Unfortunately, much of the MD is encrypted. To complicate it further, some of the object info is stored in fixed width text fields that wrap to a second or third sequential record if the information blob is too long for the field. Unless the info you need is really simple, i.e. object name, type, and version IDs, I wouldn't recommend trying to query the MD directly.

Personally, I prefer the SDK, but only because I know have a decent working knowledge and have a modest code base. If you don't have SDK experience and your timeline is short, don't bother with this route.

If you know how, VBScript a process to read the HTML docs. It's quick and should get you what you need.