Is there a free (or very cheap) tool for highlighting changes in data for sql server?

Question

Note for bounty: please answer only if you know a tool that can monitor what changes in the same db, don't mention tools that compare 2 dbs. A visual tool, like Embarcadero Change Manager is appreciated.

I'd like to have a tool that allows me to see only "what changed" in a db, given a specific action.

Scenario can be:

1) start monitoring (with the tool)

2) user performs an action on GUI (like clicking the button "apply" after having changed the telephone number of a customer)

3) stop moniroting: show changes (with the tool) (in this case I should only see that the Address field has been changed)

Embarcadero's Change manager does this, but it does also many other things, and it is expensive. I am looking for a simpler tool that does only this.

Note: I don't need schema comparison, just simple data comparison.

Answer 1

If you have SQL Server 2008 Enterprise Edition you can use Change Data Capture to expose the transaction log in a more usable format than DBCC LOG dbname,3. See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb522489.aspx for more information.

Answer 2

Check out the Lite/Free version of the various xSQL tools:

http://www.xsqlsoftware.com/LiteEdition.aspx

The have an object-level compare, as well as a data compare tool.

Those don't work "on the fly", but you can always have one database as a reference, and compare your current one against that baseline.