Off late I am searching the internet for an automated solution for SQL server database deployments primarily to avoid manual steps of maintaining and deploying sql scripts for deployments.
My situation is peculiar. It does not require me to maintain a whole database but 'only' customizations to the databases. Let me elaborate.
There are atleast 3 to 4 different SQL server databases that pertain to different 3rd party applications. I am tasked with writing integration between these systems(essentially between these many different databases in reality).
While considering to use SSDT(Sql server data tools) it advocates me to create a database project so I am not sure if it will exactly fit my need to maintain 'only' a subset of a database(I am assuming SSDT would want me to start with importing the entire database and then maintain it as I need.. which i do not want to do it this way).
If this can be achieved with SSDT, I am better off iwth that and appreciate if someone can point me in that direction to some how-tos. Otherwise, are there any other options or customized solutions that can help.?
I recently spent lot of time reading through this Simpletalk Article, but it doesn't seem to be a completely free solution. For instance, it uses an encrypted(.vbe) vb script which seems to be doing most of the tasks but the author(for some reason!) did not provide the source code for the vb script which stops me from considering..
I am not sure if I can build on top of this without having to worry about the vb script source code not available..
Overall, I am looking for a customized solution or a tool that can help me maintain changes to databases and automate deployment of my changes while adding mechanisms to maintain database versions.. Any help is much appreciated!!
TIA.
Found dbdeploy to be the tool that I can use for my task.
It has several falvors and different authorings though.
https://code.google.com/archive/p/dbdeploy/
DbDeploy.Net for use with .Net/SQL server environments.
adapted from http://sourceforge.net/projects/dbdeploy-net/ ...
... https://github.com/rakker91/dbdeploy.net
available as Nuget package
From another author: https://github.com/brunomlopes/dbdeploy.net
Related
I have an ERP system which I maintain with a team of people. However lately we seem to be loosing track of who's changing what and we need a solution to be able to control these changes. We are looking into the enterprise version of GIT as all our software development and web development would work perfectly with it. Not to mention I have some experience with GIT already.
The problem is we need the version control to extend to our SQL Server which we use SQL Server Management Studio to maintain. We have thousands of tables in 6 main databases which have a lot of stored procedures which are being changed.
It's not so much we want to control the source as in, permissions and refuse changes by people. It's more, we need a way of tracking changes and attaching explanations to help our future selves.
Does anyone know any solid solutions which would fit our purpose?
Assume the cost isn't a main factor.
I was using RedGate tool. It can integrate with Git.
RedGate SQL Source Control
I have been asking myself this question once. So I've found following solution which I can suggest you to use.
It is a SQL Server Data Tools that solves the problem.
The tools include SQL server database project for visual studio. This project will store your database structure. You can just add it to you solution. Then run a schema comparison with your database to take a snapshot of your current database state. You can choose what objects to compare. Since this moment your have all your changes being tracked by your VCS. Every change is documented now.
You can make changes in DB project and when you are done just run schema comparison, get the update script and apply those changes to your SQL server database. It is really not that hard to work with your schema from DB project as it provides intellisense, syntax validation. Also it is possible to write and execute SQL queries against you database.
I am currently working on a sample website proof of concept and planning to provide the entire VS2010 (ASP.NET and C#) solution to the company. I also use SQL Server and need to provide the database (tables(including some records) and stored procedures). What is the easiest way to ensure that I can bundle the database along with my VS2010 solution? Please provide some steps if possible.
At my company, we actually take the same approach that you're taking, and just do everything with scripts by hand for deployment. However, we do this mostly because we have a large legacy database, and we do incremental updates for a system that has to always be online.
If you're starting a new website from scratch, you might look into Database Projects inside of Visual Studio. It also has some functionality for unit testing your database built in that might be beneficial.
http://www.visualstudiotutor.com/2010/08/manage-database-projects-with-visual-studio-2010/
How do you manage your sql server database build/deploy/migrate for visual studio projects?
We have a product that includes a reasonable database part (~100 tables, ~500 procs/functions/views), so we need to be able to deploy new databases of the current version as well as upgrade older databases up to the current version. Currently we maintain separate scripts for creation of new databases and migration between versions. Clearly not ideal, but how is anyone else dealing with this?
This is complicated for us by having many customers who each have their own db instance, rather than say just having dev/test/live instances on our own web servers, but the processes around managing dev/test/live for others must be similar.
UPDATE: I'd prefer not to use any proprietary products like RedGate's (although I have always heard they're really good and will look into that as a solution).
We use Red-Gate SQLCompare and SQLDataCompare to handle this. The idea is simple. Both compare products let you maintain a complete image of the schema or data from selected tables (e.g. configuration tables) as scripts. You can then compare any database to the scripts and get a change script. We keep the scripts in our Mercurial source control and tag (label) each release. Support can then go get the script for any version and use the Redgate tools to either create from scratch or upgrade.
Redgate also has an API product that allows you to do the compare function from your code. For example, this would allow you to have an automatic upgrade function in your installer or in the product itself. We often use this for our hosted web apps as it allows us to more fully automate the rollout process. In our case, we have an MSBuild task that support can execute to do an automatic rollout and upgrade. If you distribute to third-parties, you have to pay a small additional license fee for each distribution that includes the API.
Redgate also has a tool that automatically packages a database install or upgrade. We don't use that one as we have found that the compare against scripts for a version gives us more flexibility.
The Redgate tools also help us in development because they make it trivial to source control the schema and configuration data in a very granular way (each database object can be placed in its own file)
The question was asked before SSDT projects appeared, but that's definitely the way I'd go nowadays, along with hand-crafting migration scripts for structural db changes where there is data that would be affected.
There's also the MS VSTS method (2008 description here), anyone got a good article on doing this with 2010 and the pros/cons of using these tools?
I'd like to have all DB DDL code under CVS.
We are using Subversion for our .NET code but all database code remains still unversioned.
All we know is how important DB logic can be. I've googled but I've found only few (expensive tools). I believe there exists other (cheaper) solution(s).
What approach do you advise to follow? What tools are most appropriate?
SQL Server 2005, VS 2008 TS, TSVN
UPDATE
Our coding scenario is that developers cannot access to PROD DB directly. It is changed only by scripts (so this is not a problem)
I'm mostly interested in the DEV environment where all of developers have full access.
So it happens that a developer overwrite USP previously changed by another.
I'd like to have the possibility to restore lost version / compare USPs revisions etc.
UPDATE-2
To create deployment script we are using Red-Gate SQL Compare.
Works perfectly - so deployment scripts are not a case.
If you haven't already read it, Martin Fowler's article Evolutionary Database Design is a great place to start.
The article is hard to summarize, but it describes how his team dealt with database versioning in a rapidly changing development process. They created their own tools to facilitate things: scripts to bring users up to the current master, to copy any version of the schema so users could debug one another's working copies, etc..
For a solid low-tech solution, I've found it helpful to keep two kinds of DDL scripts in source control:
A master version that can create the database objects from scratch.
'Version upgrade' scripts for each development iteration.
They're redundant to a degree, but extremely useful (particularly when it comes to deployment).
If you haven't already looked at the Visual Studio Database Edition GDR (a.k.a. "Data Dude"), you should definitely download it and try it out:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=bb3ad767-5f69-4db9-b1c9-8f55759846ed&displaylang=en
Among other things, the GDR will facilitate team development by making it easy for each developer to maintain their own local copy of a database, version scripts, create deployment scripts to move a database schema to a new version, and even support database rollback.
It's free if you are using team system developer edition. Check it out.
If you are using Visual Studio Team Suite or Visual Studio Developer Edition, you are entitled to a copy of Visual Studio Database Professional. This is designed to do exactly what you describe, and much more. We use it to manage our database schema (code).
Randy
We use Subversion for all our database code as well. Since nothing is allowed to go to Prod unless it is in a script, there seems to be no porblem with getting people to put all the scripts into subversion. We tend to write alter table scripts to change tables with existing data and then recreate the whole table structure in case we need to create a new database from scratch (we often have the same database structure on multiple servers as some of our clients are very large and do not want their data accidentally available to the competition and so pay for separate servers and therefore may need to create the whole database again with no data.) For objects that don't directly store data we drop the orginal object and recreate it with a create statement. Each project has it's own home inthe repository and each database does too, so the script may be in more than one place to facilitate deployment.
But the real key is that no one can load to Prod without a script. We don't give our devs direct rights to prod, so they have no problem doing things in scripts as opposed to using SSMS.
I wrote SMOscript which generates a CREATE script for each object in a database.
Use this tool to generate into a directory covered by CVS, and update your repository.
Finally I found this tool and approach extremely useful and very easy to introduce
(at least at the beginning - where no versioning solution on the place):
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/database/SQLScripter.aspx
You can run it out of the box.
For final solution I'd incline to GDR.
This also sounds interesting:
Freeware:
http://dbsourcetools.codeplex.com/
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/database/ScriptDB4Svn.aspx
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/database/SQLScripter.aspx
http://blog.boxedbits.com/archives/133
Commercial:
http://www.nobhillsoft.com/Randolph.aspx
You should use Management Studio (SSMS) and place the .sql under source control, possibly separate schema objects under folders.
Hope this helps
See if Wizardby fits your needs.
I've been searching for some time for a good solution to implement the idea of managing schema on an SQL Server Compact 3.5 database.
I know of several ways of managing schema on SQL Server Express, SQL Server Standard, SQL Server Enterprise, but the Compact Edition doesn't support the necessary tools required to use the same methodology.
Any suggestions/tips?
I should expand this to say that it is for 100+ clients with wrapperware software. As the system changes, I need to publish update scripts alongside the new binaries to the client. I was looking for a decent method by which to publish this without having to just hand the client a script file and say "Run this in SSMSE". Most clients are not capable of doing such a beast.
A buddy of mine disclosed a partial script on how to handle the SQL Server piece of my task, but never worked on Compact Edition. It looks like I'll be on my own for this.
What I think that I've decided to do, and it's going to need a "geek week" to accomplish, is to write some sort of a tool much like how WiX and NAnt works, so that I can just write an overzealous XML document to handle the work.
If I think that it is worthwhile, I'll publish it on CodePlex and/or The Code Project because I've used both sites a bit to gain better understanding of concepts for jobs I've done in the past, and I think it is probably worthwhile to give back a little.
Edit on 5/3/2010:
If someone is willing to "name" the project, I'll upload the dirty/nasty version that I've written for MS SQL to CodePlex so that maybe we can start hacking out a version of SQL Compact. Although, I think with the next revision of the initial application that I was planning, I'm going to be abandoning SQL Compact and just use XML Files for storage, as the software is being converted from an Installable package to being a Silverlight application. Silverlight just gives a better access strategy.
I am currently looking into Migrator.Net.
This allows you to write changes to your database, called migrations, directly in C#.
These migrations can contain everything from simple table additions/drops, column modifications, to complicated data update code.
When your application boots, it can verify what version the database is currently in and apply any migrations that are required to bring it up to date. All this is handled automatically. The code to run this update is as simple as:
Assembly asm = Assembly.Load("LocalModels.migration");
Migrator m = new Migrator("SqlServerCe", "Data Source=LocalModels.sdf", asm, false);
m.MigrateToLastVersion();
I am having a couple minor issues with the Compact support (it assumes the default schema is dbo). But I don't think it will be too difficult to fix them.
some random thoughts (not sure I can fully answer though)
the Microsoft Sync Framework is one option. I haven't had a chance to fully appreciate what it can do once you've deployed it after the initial first time (which seems to work fine). There's a MSDN site for it here
You can execute scripts on a mobile device, but not through something like SQL Management Studio, so in theory you could manage/maintain T-SQL scripts but the down side is that the T-SQL would be convoluted (to CE's supported statements) and I don't know a way to "automate" execution - but the Sync Framework might hold some answers..
If one of your key criteria is going to be working efficiently over a small pipe, the only real choice you have is to store a DB Schema Version (maybe somehow tied to the scripts checked into your CMS) and when an update is needed, the change scripts are sent over the wire and applied in order. You would probably want to keep a log in your DB as well of these scripts being applied so you can gracefully handle disconnects, reboots and other potentially nasty problems.
Is SQL Server Management Studio any use for you?
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms172933.aspx