Using MS Team System 2008 Database Edition

Question

Hi, guys!

I'm wanting to start source controlling our DBs. I've read a lot of questions here and have found that MS Team System 2008 with Database Edition is what I need. So we get it and we are kind of lost really.

We would like in first place, compare the different DBs we have (DEV, STA and PROD) because we had never done any source control on the DBs, they probably have some differences we would like to solve. I've read that MS Team System 2008 DB Edition could do it, but I think we are not finding how to.

Once we had every DB on the same "state", we would like to create some kind of plan to spread changes from local developers DB to some source control (I think putting the Database Project under SVN will do the job). And then have a way to generate the "change script" to propagate the changes to STA, and then to PROD of course. Any ideas of how to do this?

This probably has been already asked, but I guess I'm not finding anything because I'm not using the correct terms to search.

A link to another SO question or to some article describing how to work with MS Team System 2008 Database Edition and SQL Server 2005 projects will be very welcomed.

Thanks to all

Cheers

Answer 1

The answer to your first question is the schema and data comparison features of Visual Studio Team System - Database Developer. You should have a menu item between Build and Test called Data. Under that data menu are options like "Schema Compare" and "Data Compare" - they are fairly intuitive to use.

The next question is how to use the source control on the databases. Source control should be your one source of truth for schema. When you create your database projects and store them in source control, I would suggest having them mirror production initially. Then you can apply changes to the projects and compare the projects to target environments like dev/QA/prod to identify and script out differences that could be moved to those environments.

EDIT: I would also highly recommend chapter 8 in the book "Professional Team Foundation Server". That chapter covers usage of Team Edition for Database Professionals for the purposes of managing schemas.