A Wandering Mind

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of work re-writing some reporting code that was performing terribly. You know the old joke “Start it, then go get a cup of coffee, then come back”? Well in this case, that would be more like “Start it, get a cup of coffee, go for a run, read the morning news, eat lunch, take a nap, eat dinner, watch an hour of TV, then come back.” Ugh…

Obviously it’s important when modifying and tuning code to ensure that you don’t affect the results that come out of the procedure. Normally I like to do this using unit tests, but in this case the logic of the procedure was so complex (and relied on a bunch of underlying vendor code) that to create tests for it would have taken weeks. So instead, I opted for the strategy of simply comparing the old and new output, given a set of standard parameters. At first I did this manually, but after comparing 200+ columns a few times, I said to myself, “Self! This is silly, why not use Powershell to compare the results automatically?”

The result is the Compare-SQLResultSet function. It’s rough and currently doesn’t handle differently shaped results sets at all, but it has already been a huge time saver. I hope to improve it as time goes on, but wanted to get it out so others in the community could use it. Because if you’re doing this kind of comparison work manually… well, perhaps you should find a different line of work, because clearly you’re not getting it.

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