I have blogged previously at SSDT – What’s in a name? about the naming confusion that Microsoft have created by their inconsistent use of the term “SQL Server Data Tools” (SSDT) in SQL Server 2012. Is it a Visual Studio shell incorporating project templates for building databases, SSIS packages, SSAS cubes & SSRS reports? Or is it simply the ...

Over the last year or so it will not have escaped my regular readers’ attention that much of my blogging has centred around SSDT database projects. SSDT (and its variously named forebears) is a tool that I have been using in some way, shape or form since 2007 and in that time I have built up what I feel is a sound body of knowledge and experience; ...

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 ...

I recently wrote an article on SQL Server Data Tools for SQL Server Magazine and it has now been published online at Get to Know SQL Server 2012's SQL Server Data Tools. In the article I offer my thoughts and opinions on SQL Server Data Tools as it exists in SQL Server 2012. Note that the article refers to SSDT database projects only, there ...

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 ...

I have stumbled across a nuance of SSDT that other users should be cognizant of. I published an SSDT database project onto an existing database that already had data in it but that Publish operation failed: The error message was: (10036,1): SQL72014: .Net SqlClient Data Provider: Msg 547, Level 16, State 0, Line 1 The ALTER TABLE ...

Good news was announced yesterday for those that are using SSDT and want to write unit tests, unit testing functionality is now available. The announcement was made on the SSDT team blog in post Available Today: SSDT—December 2012. Here are a few thoughts about this news. Firstly, there seems to be a general impression that database unit testing ...

Publish profile files are a new feature of SSDT database projects that enable you to package up all environment-specific properties into a single file for use at publish time; I have written about them before at Publish Profile Files in SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) and if it wasn’t obvious from that blog post, I’m a big fan! As I have used ...

Sometimes I write blog posts mainly so that I can find stuff when I need it later. This is such a blog post. Of late I have been writing lots of deployment scripts and I am fan of putting big labels into deployment scripts (which, these days, reside in SSDT) so one can easily see what’s going on as they execute. Here’s such an example from my ...

I’ve just been alerted by my colleague Kyle Harvie to a Visual Studio 2010 add-in that should prove very useful if you are an SSDT user. Its simply called Highlight all occurrences of selected word and does exactly what it says on the tin, you highlight a word and it shows all other occurrences of that word in your script: There’s a ...