An auditing tool that can compare the contents of two databases, even when they are active, is now easier to use and more secure, claimed GoldenGate Software, as it announced version 2 of its Veridata data comparison engine.

The company said tools to check data for consistency can be vital in projects such as system or data migration, replication, disaster recovery, and compliance reporting. Without consistency checking, data analysts may get inexplicable errors or differing results and waste a lot of time hunting for problems that aren't really there.

"In version 2, we focused on usability and the user experience of the product," said Irem Radzik, GoldenGate's product marketing director. She added that Veridata now has a web-based interface to add flexibility and user-based customization.

It has also been shifted to a web services architecture, enabling it to be queried from other applications, and now includes role-based security, allowing users to have different level of access based on their assigned role, she said.

"Veridata's main benefit is to identify data inconsistencies fast, automatically, and before they cause any downstream issues," Radzik noted.

"IT teams face various system errors and many of them are due to data inconsistencies. Identifying the cause of the problem is usually very time consuming. GoldenGate Veridata shortens this time significantly and helps point IT teams to what exactly to fix in terms of data inconsistency."

She said that the software - which is priced according to the two nodes that it compares and starts at US$90,000 - supports Oracle on a wide range of platforms, plus HP's Enscribe and NonStop SQL/MP databases.