How to add Stored Procedures to Version Control

Question

Our team just experienced for the first time the hassle of not having version control for our DB. How can we add stored procedures at the very least to version control? The current system we're developing relies on SPs mainly.

Answer 1

We just add the CREATE statement to source control in a .sql file, e.g.:

-- p_my_sp.sql
CREATE PROCEDURE p_my_sp
AS
    -- Procedure

Make sure that you only put one SP per file, and that the filename exactly matches the procedure name (it makes things so much easier to find the procedure in source control)

You then just need to be disciplined about not applying a stored procedure to your database that hasn't come from source control.

An alternative would be to save the SP as an ALTER statement instead - this has the advantage of making it easier to update an existing database, but means you need to do some tweaking to create a new empty database.

Answer 2

I think it's good to have each stored procedure scripted to a separate .sql file and then just commit those files into source control. Any time a sproc is changed, update the creation script - this gives you full version history on a sproc by sproc basis.

There are SQL Server source control tools that hook into SSMS, but I think they are just scripting the db objects and committing those scripts. Red Gate looks to be due to releasing such a tool this year for example.

Answer 3

Background: I develop a system that has almost 2000 stored procedures.

The critical thing I have found is to treat the database as an application. You would never open an EXE with a hex editor directly and edit it. The same with a database; just because you can edit the stored procedures from the database does not mean you should.

Treat the copy of the the stored procedure in source control as the current version. It is your source code. Check it out, edit it, test it, install it, and check it back in. The next time it has to be changed, follow the same procedure. Just as an application requires a build and deploy process, so should the stored procedures.

The code below is a good stored procedure template for this process. It handles both cases of an update (ALTER) or new install (CREATE). The second sample is better in situations where you control access to the stored procedures. The DROP-CREATE method loses GRANT information.

IF EXISTS(SELECT name
            FROM sysobjects
           WHERE name = 'MyProc' AND type = 'P' AND uid = '1')
   DROP PROCEDURE dbo.MyProc
GO

CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.MyProc
AS

GO

-- or --

IF NOT EXISTS(SELECT name
            FROM sysobjects
           WHERE name = 'MyProc' AND type = 'P' AND uid = '1')
   CREATE PROCEDURE dbo.MyProc
   AS
   PRINT 'No Op'
GO

ALTER PROCEDURE dbo.MyProc
AS

GO

In addition, creating a process to build the database completely from source control can help in keeping things controlled.

Create a new database from source control. Use a tool like Red Gate SQL Compare to compare the two databases and identify differences. Reconcile the differences.

A cheaper solution is to simply use the "Script As" functionality of SQL Management Studio and do a text compare. However, this method is real sensitive to the exact method SSMS uses to format the extracted SQL.