An overview of the Data Comparison toolset

The Data Comparison toolset contains tools to compare one dataset with another dataset to report similarities and differences. You can use these tools to identify changes made to a dataset.

Most of these tools are effective in detecting updates made to existing data in the dataset. When detecting added or deleted data, they are only effective in identifying the first instance of an addition or deletion. They can report differences with geometry, tabular values, spatial reference, and field definitions.

The Detect Feature Changes tool finds spatially matching features in two datasets and produces output features with their spatial and attribute change information.

Tool	Description
Detect_Feature_Changes	Finds where the update line features spatially match the base line features and detects spatial changes, attribute changes, or both, as well as no change, and creates an output feature class containing matched update features with information about their changes, unmatched update features, and unmatched base features.
Feature Compare	Compares two feature classes or layers and returns the comparison results. Feature Compare can report differences with geometry, tabular values, spatial reference, and field definitions.
File Compare	Compares two files and returns the comparison results. File Compare can report differences between two ASCII files or two binary files.
Raster Compare	Compares the properties of two raster datasets, two raster catalogs, or two mosaic dataset and then returns the comparison result.
Table Compare	Compares two tables or table views and returns the comparison results. This tool can report differences and similarities with tabular values and field definitions.
TIN Compare	Compares two TINs and returns the comparison results. TIN Compare can report differences with geometry, TIN node and triangle tags, and spatial reference.

Tools in the Data Comparison toolset