visual studio eye for the dba guy

okay, i'm slightly ashamed to admit it, but today i finally saw the visual studio team edition for database professionals in action.  vsts expert rich Hundhausen was demoing to a customer and i wanted to tag along to see this new feature set available to the team system family.

after 40 minutes of seeing some of the simple features all i could say was: cool.

seriously.  it was so simplistic, yet so necessary and needed for the db developer world.  here's a run-down of some of the features i saw today:

• creating db schemas by reverse engineering
• diff'ing schemas to other projects *and* other databases (note: you can do this without having to setup a project, reverese engineer anything etc)
• schema compares
• build and deploy implementations with msbuild
• data generation plans -- this was cool, a true data gen built into the product (which can be a part of a build plan as well to always start with a consistent state) -- can use static info, or retrieve data from a database, or you can set parameters, regex, etc., etc.
• unit testing of db scripts (pre, test, post scripts)
• source control integration with the vsts policies, etc.

it seriously put a little geeky grin on my face.  i got back to the office and downloaded it immediately (you can get ctp4 from here).  i'd encourage you to take a look and play around with it.

and as we know, the easiest way to learn is to teach.  i'm giving a demo at the next sql server user group meeting in my area!