“Diffing” objects from a relational database

Question

Our win32 application assembles objects from the data in a number of tables in a MySQL relational database. Of such an object, multiple revisions are stored in the database.

Answer 1

I'm riffing off of what Harry Lime suggested: Output your properties to text format, then hash the results. That way you can compare the hash values and easily flag the data that has been altered. This way you get the best of both worlds as you can visually see differences but programmatically identify differences. With the has you'll have a good source for an index should you want to store and retrieve the deltas.