Red Gate tools vs SQL Server Data Tools

Published at May 16, 2018 ·  18 min read

Recently I have been tasked with showing a development team how to version their SQL databases using the Red Gate tools. Normally I mentor and give guidance in these kinds of projects using the SQL Server Data Tools but because their databases were so large they found that the SSDT approach would just not work for them. They did find in their own experiments that the Red Gate tools did not impose these limitations and worked quite well dispite their database size....

Database Unit Testing from the Beginning

Published at November 15, 2011 ·  11 min read

The concept of unit testing for a database and really this means a database project still seems like a wild idea. Of course I am still surprise how many development shops still use their production database as their source of truth which it shouldn’t be but that’s because they do not have their database in source control. In order to take you down the road to explore some of the benefits that are going to be available to you with being able to run unit tests on your database I need to get us all caught up with how to create a database project as this is where the magic happens....

Database Schema Compare where Visual Studio goes that extra mile

Published at January 27, 2011 ·  7 min read

There are a number of good database tools out there for doing database schema comparisons. I have used different ones over the years at first initially to help me write SQL differencing scripts that I could use when deploying database changes. If your background is anything like mine where you were namely a Visual Basic or a C# developer and could get by with working on SQL if you could write directly to the database....