Visual Studio Database Guide

New Post: update for SSDT

zipperle — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 08:33:56 GMT

Any news?
When will there be an update?

Thanks!

New Post: update for SSDT

holisticdeveloper — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 22:17:31 GMT

I would love to hear of any progress in this area. I have been looking at deploying VS database projects in our team, but now that VS 2012 only supports SSDT functionality I'm not sure if it is the right time to do so or not.

Are you waiting on some additional functionality being added into SSDT (like unit tests)?

New Post: Database projects, Setup and Deployment and WiX

mazin_sali — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 14:14:13 GMT

You can also use the WIX Extension for easier integration for deployment. http://wixdeployment.codeplex.com/

Reviewed: Guidance (Nov 21, 2012)

cbitter — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 15:02:58 GMT

Rated 5 Stars (out of 5) - Excellent set of best practises and their implementation.

Source code checked in, #16392

Project Collection Service Accounts — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 20:28:03 GMT

Upgrade: New Version of LabDefaultTemplate.xaml. To upgrade your build definitions, please visit the following link: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=254563

Source code checked in, #16391

Project Collection Service Accounts — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 20:26:15 GMT

Checked in by server upgrade

New Post: Looking forward to checking it out, but XPS?

JensS — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 19:58:45 GMT

Thanks for the information. Upcoming releases of the ALM Ranger document will only come in PDF, so there won´t be the problem in the future.

Anyway, thanks for noticing !

-Jens

New Post: update for SSDT

JensS — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 19:57:25 GMT

Yes, there are plans. We´ll keep the community informed about the planning and eventually the schedule as soon as we have the information.

-Jens

New Post: Looking forward to checking it out, but XPS?

astanton1978 — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 15:36:28 GMT

Also, the XPS version does not allow me to print the doc in portrait, it always comes out as bottom clipped landscape no matter what setting.

I have no problems with portrait of the PDF version.

New Post: update for SSDT

daniels19 — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 07:34:17 GMT

Hi,

Do you plan an update of the guide for SSDT?

Reviewed: Guidance (May 24, 2012)

cuvijay76 — Fri, 25 May 2012 06:02:23 GMT

Rated 5 Stars (out of 5) - This is a very fabulus document done by Code Plex

New Post: reference data

JensS — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 16:13:30 GMT

Hi,

and good to hear that this is also a feasible way for you. According to "It's curious to see that nobody has anything to say about this.", sorry for that. Sometime the alerts dive under my radar in my personal inbox. Not my intention to ignore anyone here. I encourage you to simply *bump* if there is no response.

-Jens

New Post: reference data

dpachla — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 15:21:53 GMT

Hi Jens,

That definitely makes sense. What you've explained will work for me too. I'm finding myself now asking, if there is going to be another database involved, why not back up and restore a reference database to perform the merge? It seems like that would be the fastest and most accurate. These types of tables are typically coming from a third party anyway, and just like in your case, they are not updated very often so the costly merge process can be avoided in 99% of deployments.

Thanks for the great info.

New Post: reference data

JensS — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 07:47:10 GMT

Hi dpachla,

you mentioned that inserting big chunks of data can be painful as you want to minimize the deployment time and have your system up and running in the shortest amount of time. Beside having static data captured in INSERT scripts, I also had truck loads of data needed to be synced / updated during a delta-deployment / initial deployment. There are several approaches we took, but this is the one where we made sure that we have the least impact on the deployment and the existing database. (We imported and synced street data to support a street catalog)

-Insert the data in a seperate database using methods like BULK insert, SSIS loading, bcp. Make sure that you are able to place the data files of the reference catalog on another spindle than the operational database for performance reasons.

-Update your database schema

-Use Merge (where accessible due to compatibility) and sync the data with your database

-Drop the database with the reference data to clean the house again.

This can be either than within the deployment process using script in the preprocessor commands (we had a sample for that in the HOL where we needed to cope with the NULLability) or as a seperate process. Using a separate manual process is in most cases the better thing as in our case the reference data did not change that often and therefore we could get rid of the costly import and syncs most of the time only doing the sync when needed.

Does this make sense to you ?

-Jens

New Post: reference data

dpachla — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 17:28:28 GMT

It's curious to see that nobody has anything to say about this. I've only seen blips, including this very guidance document pg. 71, about this issue which define the simple reference table with just a few or a few hundred rows. The guide clearly states that the deployment script "must be re-runnable or idempotent". Easy enough. What, however, is the best practice if the reference table has several hundred thousand rows, like a medication or medical procedure code reference table? I've done some searching on the net and it just points right back http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bahill/archive/2009/04/01/maintaining-and-synchronizing-your-reference-data.aspx. The real issue is that VSDBCMD takes for-e-ver to insert the rows to even perform a merge or during initial deployment using the post-deployment script with INSERT commands. This is obviously not a great solution since deployments should really be as fast as possible. The only thing I can think of is to include a .dat file in the deployment to perform a bulk insert and recreate the table every time or use to the MERGE approach mentioned above. I would interested to hear what has been done to deal with this issue.

New Post: Database projects in Visual Studio 2012?

JensS — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 18:20:32 GMT

We will keep the community informed, right now it is just in the planning. We have been using the product for some months now and wanted to wait for the final version to ensure concistency with the guidance documentation. Look out for the ALM Rangers blog or on my blog here http://blogs.msdn.com/Jenss

-Jens

New Post: Database projects in Visual Studio 2012?

olsa005 — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 14:31:12 GMT

Thank you very much for this information. It was good news and helped me a lot !

Do you know when the upgraded database guidance document will be avaiable?

New Post: Database projects in Visual Studio 2012?

JensS — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 16:36:32 GMT

Hi and welcome to the group,

this is more than rumors, this is reality already present in the CTP bits of SQL Server. But (and here comes a really small but), the developer experience will be stay the same, the old project type will simply move over to SQL Server projects which is then present in VS2010 / VS(next) or SQL Server 2012. Without copying all the interesting stuff in here, I really encourage you to move over to the SSTD (SQL Server Development Tools) Blog http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ssdt/ or download the latest CTP to make yourself a picture of it.

The good news is that we wil upgrade the database guidance document to build a successor of the existing document and to adhere new best practices, so stay tunes. If you have any questions feel free to drop them here or to me (Jens.Suessm€yer@@@microsoft.c0m). I will point you to the needed information and help you where possible.

-Jens

New Post: Database projects in Visual Studio 2012?

olsa005 — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:42:47 GMT

What about database projects in Visual Studio 2012? Will the functionallity be the same as in Visual Studio 2010? I have heard a rumor that says that the database project template will be removed from Visual Studio 2012?

New Post: Making the transition to Database Projects

JensS — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 21:00:33 GMT

I hear from your description that you are not using Visual Studio Database projects, right ? If you use VSDB for your development you don´t have to care about moving the schema from one version to another as VSDBCMD will do that for you during the deployment. You will just have to provide the dbschema file how the database should like after the deployment. VSDBCMD command / the deployment engine will calculate the changes and create the motion scripts for getting version n + version n+1. Therefore there would be no more need to maintain scripts with an increasing number.

-Jens

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Visual Studio ALM Core Ranger

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