As you may have realised from much of my blogging over the past year or so I’m an advocate of using SSDT database projects for building database solutions on SQL Server. I have been using SSDT database projects a lot in that time and have come up with a checklist of things to consider when starting a new SSDT database project and I’ll be detailing ...

Interesting the stuff you pick up from reading forums… “The BATCH seperators [in SSDT deployment scripts] are used to provide scoping when resolving object shapes. SSDT or VSDB scripts for that matter serve a different purpose, they provide the blueprint of the model you want, and do not represent how it will be used to construct the target ...

SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) is released on a very regular cadence (note that I’m talking about the database projects part of SSDT, this is nothing to do with SSIS/SSAS/SSRS). Since the first release in March 2012 there have been releases in September 2012, November 2012, & December 2012. I personally have found it difficult to keep track of ...

My recent article Get to Know SQL Server 2012's SQL Server Data Tools prompted two questions to come to me via email and in the interests of sharing knowledge via search engines I thought I would answer them here rather than by simply replying by email (I hate that so much useful information gets trapped inside closed inboxes). Question: How ...

In SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) one way to create a new object is to right click on a folder in Solution Explorer and point to Add. Doing so will display this menu: A number of options are offered for creating a brand new object (“function”, “table”, “stored proc” etc…) and one of them is “Script”. If your preference is to handcraft the DDL ...

Over the past few years of using datadude (aka DBPro aka Visual Studio Database Projects) I have fallen prey to a peculiar little nuance – if you forget to supply a value for a sqlcmd variable then it will simply use a default and often that is not the desired behaviour. Hence why yesterday I submitted the following suggestion to ...

Test-Driven Development (TDD) is a software development practise that has been around for a few years. Wikipedia describes it as: Test-driven development (TDD) is a software development process that relies on the repetition of a very short development cycle: first the developer writes a failing automated test case that defines a desired ...

Over the past eighteen months I have worked on four separate projects for customers that wanted to make use of Visual Studio 2010 Database projects to manage their database schema.* All the while I have been trying to take lots of notes in order that I can write the blog post that you are reading right now – a compendium of experiences and tips ...

I have come across a bug in Visual Studio 2010 Database Projects (aka datadude aka DPro aka Visual Studio Database Development Tools aka Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals aka Juneau aka SQL Server Data Tools) that other people may encounter so, for the purposes of googling, I'm writing this blog post about it. Through my own ...

Today I have been using Windows Installer XML (WiX) to build an installer (.msi file) that would install a SQL Server database on a server of my choosing; the source code for that database lives in datadude (a tool which you may know by one of quite a few other names). The basis for this work was a most excellent blog post by Duke Kamstra entitled ...