Also Coming Up: SQL Source Control
Deploying an application is only half the battle -- probably less, in fact. You also have to set up the environment that the application will run in. A huge part of setting up that environment is ensuring that the database the application will work with has all the changes made to it that the application requires. As changes accrue in the development system, how do you ensure that those changes are made to the production system before your new application starts? You
could count on developers remembering and reporting all of the changes they make. You
could have a risky way of ensuring all changes to the database structure are tracked. But I repeat myself.
Red-Gate's newest offering, SQL Source Control, deals with your changes to your database the same way that you deal with changes to your code: Through source control. At least that's their plan. As I said in my last blog post (Next Up: Designing Databases), in the December issue of Visual Studio Magazine we're looking at one of our readers' favorite design-time tools for databases (ERWin). We're also going to look what could be a key tool for getting those designs into production: Red Gate's SQL Source Control.
Posted by Peter Vogel on 11/19/2010