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How To Manage Database Development More Efficiently

VS Team System 2008 Database Edition GDR is a component of the Visual Studio Team System suite of tools. It was formerly known as “DB Pro”. As the General Distribution Release, it is a post-service pack 1 release. It incorporates several of the features slated for Visual Studio 2010 “Rosario”. It also has SQL Server 2008 support.

Some of the key features of this Team System release are listed below:

  1. T-SQL Editor The T-SQL Editor support ad hoc queries within Visual Studio without having to rely on SQL Management Studio (finally!). Also like Management Studio, Team System 2008 Database Edition supports client statistics, results as text and results as file. Unfortunately there is no Intellisense for SQL Server 2008 built in.
  2. Database Projects This tool supports off-line schema development in a file format denoted by *.dbschema files. Being able to develop against non-live files is a huge advantage for shared database development. Version control is also supported to capture schema changes as they are developed. Within the Database Projects, compile-time schema validation and static code analysis are presented as warnings. Refactoring and deployment is also made easier by the Database Project tools.
  3. Server Projects Server Projects model both shared and server-level objects. This enables a team to define a standard configuration for their SQL servers and reference it within their Database Projects.
  4. Schema Compare While it’s nice to have an integrated schema compare feature, we’ve found that the Red Gate SQL Compare tool is a better product. One big advantage of VS Team System 2008 Database Edition, though, is that you can compare against the *.dbschema files created in Database Projects.
  5. Data Compare Again, the Data Compare utility is not as robust or feature-rich as RedGate’s SQL Data Compare. That said, it is still useful to have this utility integrated within Visual Studio for simple data comparison.
  6. Data Generation Plan The Data Generation Plan tool is very powerful for quickly populating an empty schema with valid data for testing purposes. The generator supports filling all primitive types with random data, including int, float, bit, datetime, string and more. It will handle foreign key constraints. The tool allows for regular expression data generation as well as sequential data binding. In terms of populating an entire table, the Data Generation Plan allows the user to specify a distribution for numbers or dates (uniform, exponential, etc.). The user can specify the percentage of null values, the starting seed as well as fields that should be generated as unique.
  7. Database Unit Testing The Database Unit Testing module allows for a number of predefined test conditions. Some of these include empty result sets, execution time, non-empty result sets, row count or scalar values. Custom test conditions are also possible, such as “number of columns expected”. This tool will also facilitate automatic generation of test script stubs.

In conclusion, Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition GDR provides a great deal of helpful tools to aide developers in database creation, comparing, populating and testing. This Team System package is a must-have for any SQL developer.

For more on database best practices, check out this series on SQL Server tuning

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