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!
tags: vsts, team+data, visual+studio, dba, sql+server