MSDN Magazine - March 2009 - (Page 84) D ATA B A S E D E V E L O P M E N T Introducing New Features In The VSTS Database Edition GDR Jamie Laflen and Barclay Hill In November 2008, the General Distribution Release (GDR) for Microsoft Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) Database Edition was released. The GDR installs on top of the initial release of VSTS Database Edition, but it is more than a minor version upgrade. The GDR adds support for SQL Server , incorporates improvements to existing features, includes many new features and extensibility points, and incorporates features that were previously released as power tools. In this article, we focus specifically on highlighting new features in the GDR, including its support for offline schema development, tools that support new processes that you can use when you develop a database schema, and features that support database administration. In addition to these process improvements, VSTS Database Edition GDR also provides the following capabilities: This article discusses: • Offline Schema Development • Product Architectural Changes • Introducing Server Projects • SQL CLR Project Support • Interpretation and evaluation of your project’s schema and interdependencies. Offline processing enables developers to catch syntax and reference errors prior to deployment. • Refactoring—By using VSTS Database Edition, you can change the name of an object (such as a table or column), and that change will update all references to the new name. • Automated differencing engine—When you deploy a project, it generates a Transact-SQL (T-SQL) script that contains only the necessary changes to make the target database match the source. • Database unit testing—You can use a designer that enables development of T-SQL-oriented tests to exercise and verify your schema prior to checking in your code. • Test data generation—You can use this tool to generate pseudo-random realistic test data that can be used when you run unit tests. Along with descriptions of the capabilities these features provide, you’ll find some hands-on examples that show them in action. Offline Schema Development Historically, database schema development has required writing code against a shared development server and then writing update scripts to migrate changes from one environment to another. This approach does not provide any way to track and merge changes to database objects, which makes moving changes from one environment to another a very manual process. Technologies discussed: VSTS 2008 Database Edition GDR 84 msdn magazine
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