2918.aspx

Visual Studio 2005 Team System for Database Professionals CTP

Finally a tool from Microsoft that gives better control over database development. Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professionals addresses common problems with database development today:

• The new Visual Studio Database Project allows you to import your database schema and place it under source control. When the time comes to deploy schema changes the new project system allows you to quickly build update scripts and then provides a mechanism to deploy them to the database of your choice


• Rename Refactoring allows you to easily rename any object in your database and be assured that all references to that object will be renamed to correspond to the change


• A New T-SQL editor allows you to be more productive when writing T-SQL code from within Visual Studio including support for parallel execution of queries and viewing of execution plans


• SchemaCompare allows you to quickly compare the schema of two databases (or your source controlled project and a database) and script updates to bring the database schemas into sync


• DataCompare allows you to quickly compare two databases and script updates to bring the data in these databases into sync


• The Database Unit Testing infrastructure allows you to create database unit tests using T-SQL or managed code


• DataGenerator lets you create data generation plans that produce repeatable sets of meaningful data based upon your existing production databases that can be deployed to a database prior to running unit tests thus ensuring consistent test results

Finally! I have seen too many cases at clients where stored procedures have names like usp_whatever_1, usp_whatever_2 and usp_whatever_new because they have no idea what the change may break or a way to roll back to an older version.  I have written several ad-hoc data synchronization tools in the past so I look forwared to having a tool that not only synchronizes data but schemas as well. All of it integrated in Team Systems. What more can you ask for?