Easily Compare Data From One Database to Another!

Upgrading to new releases of software – whether on-premise, hosted, or via SaaS – can be a time-consuming project, especially with software as complex as a payroll/benefits/HR system. With thousands of employees representing countless scenarios that might affect processes such as payroll or benefits, it’s extremely difficult to choose the most inclusive, representative samples of people, situations, and transactions to confidently validate a system upgrade.

That’s why at PDS we developed our table comparison utility – for both our own testing and your environment’s system upgrades to guarantee that all of your scenarios were accounted for. This new utility was delivered as part of the 2014 Summer Release.

Usage

Using the table compare utility is straightforward. We have predefined some comparisons that can be made, and in future releases of the product, you will be able to add ones that are geared towards your own purposes.

Once you give the job the comparison and datasets you would like to test, a user-friendly report of differences is generated. This makes it easy to detect any changes to the data, expediting the process of finding possible problems and fixes.

As an example, consider how you could ensure data integrity after a system upgrade by comparing records between a pre-update database and a post-update database. When you run benefits or payroll processing, thousands or even tens of thousands of records are changed. How do you look through your data to find every result that changed but should not have or every result that did not change but should have? With the table compare utility you can back up your database, restore it to your test environment and upgrade it, and then run parallel processes in both your pre- and post-upgrade environments. Now just run the table comparison utility, and within seconds it can highlight every difference between data sets affected by the two runs.

The table compare utility lets you compare common records across databases (as in the above example) or related records within a single database, such as the difference between two benefits processing runs or between two people’s payroll deductions. Rather than manually searching through tens of thousands of records to validate a run or find potential issues, the table compare utility can do this for you. Then, you can spend your time determining whether differences (or non-differences) were justified, rather than searching for them.

PDS is already using this utility in our release testing, an integral part of the software development life cycle. And we believe that it will help you further validate our releases or your configuration changes, saving you time during your testing process and possible headaches down the road.

Walkthrough 

The job is located in the Administrative category under ‘Processing’ in the System Administration section of Vista.

Click on Table Compare. The first screen lists the comparisons. Select one to proceed.

The next screen prompts for the selected comparison’s parameters. Change any default values accordingly. Select the type of report (see Reports section for details). The report job runs automatically when the comparison completes. Reports are sent to the email address in the ‘email’ tab.

Reports

Both reports contain identifying information* and statistics for the run as shown below:

*If there was an error, the Report ID will be -1

The summary report lists missing and differing entries and the different columns.

The detailed report lists the differing entries and the fields’ value from the first and second dataset.

Kathleen Fuh
Software Development Intern
PDS