Visual Studio 2013 SQL Schema Compare: Ignore Column Order

Question

In Visual Studio 2013, is there a way to ignore column ordering when doing a Schema Compare? I see that this feature was removed from Visual Studio 2012 (according to this: https://stackoverflow.com/a/13848952/188740), but I'm hoping it was brought back in version 2013.

Here's a quick visual to illustrate what I'd like to ignore:

Answer 1

As described on this blog post, Ignore column order is now an option in SSDT version 17.0, which is compatible with Visual Studio 2015.

If you’ve ever had to deal with accidental data motion when putting a column in the middle of a table definition, you’ll know how hard this can be to spot and manage. In this release you can now check the “Ignore Column Order” option in the Advanced Publish Options. This will append new columns to the end of an existing table rather than altering the table structure to add the column in its listed position.

You can find the setting by going into the Advanced... button section of your publish profile, as well as in the Advanced... button section of the database project properties' Debug tab.

You can also achieve the same effect by adding the following element to your publish.xml file:

<IgnoreColumnOrder>True</IgnoreColumnOrder>

Unfortunately I do not know of a way to have this work in Visual Studio 2013, but hopefully you have upgraded to a newer version of Visual Studio by now :)

Answer 2

Ignore column order is now available in VS2015.

Additionally, for relational and Azure SQL databases SSDT 17.0 GA includes a highly requested improvement to ignore column order in upgrade plans as well as numerous other bug fixes. 

See: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ssdt/2017/04/19/announcing-the-general-availability-ga-release-of-ssdt-17-0-april-2017/