The Server Scan dialog

To provide fast and responsive SQL Server scan, the Diff goes down to the UDP packet level and implements its own asynchronous server 'ping'.  The dialog, shown on the screenshot, can be invoked from Diff's connection panel. 

When the dialog opens, it immediately starts the server scan. New servers are added to the list in real time, as soon as the program receives a response from them. After the specified time (the "Wait for" field) passes, the Diff stops waiting for further server responses. You can adjust this timeout interval or you can manually [Stop] the scan at any time.

All MS SQL Servers available on the local network are represented in a 3-level tree view. On the first level there are network hosts, on the second level there are one or more SQL server instances running on that particular machine, on the third level there are details for connecting to that server instance via a particular network library (TCP/IP and/or named pipes).

There are two things you can do with the servers found during the scan:

• You can select one of them and click on the [Select] button (simply double-clicking on the node has the same effect). This closes the dialog and passes the connection parameters for the selected server back to the connection panel.
• You can set check marks on one or more nodes and then click [Add to list]. This adds the selected servers to the drop-down server list in the connection panel, without closing the server scan dialog.

In either case, the nodes you select or check must be those on the SQL-server-instance or netlib levels. If you select a server-instance node, in the connection panel it will only set the server name in the "SERVER\INSTANCE" format. If you select a netlib-specific node, it will set the server name (in a netlib-specific way, e.g.IP for TCP/IP connections), as well as the netlib parameter and the port number (for TCP/IP netlib).