We’ve all been waiting several years for this, and finally it’s here! Coinciding (approximately) with the release of SQL Server 2012, a new Feature Pack has appeared on the Microsoft web site that adds a full suite of PowerShell cmdlets for DDL and other functions. This means that, at last, we can do things like fully-featured SQL deployment ...

Earlier today I had a need to get some information out of a Visual Studio project file and in this blog post I’m going to share a couple of ways of going about that because I’m pretty sure I won’t be the only person that ever wants to do this. The specific problem I was trying to solve was finding out how many objects in my database project (i.e. ...

I’m writing a series of articles on how to migrate “departmental” data into SQL Server. I also hold workshops on the entire process – from discovering that the data exists to the modeling process and then how to design the Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) process. Finally I write about (and teach) a few methods on actually moving the data. One ...