I was just about to buy redgate.com's compare package when I came to realize it seems highly unlikely a task like this isn't something that can be performed from the Management Studio.
I have a development database and I have a live database.
I develop my application adding stored procedures, correcting small things in the data structure and maybe add some new tables.
Now I want the changes added to the live server. As it is unlikely I have kept 100% track of all of my changes I would of course like if it just new itself what I have changed.
Does anyone know what's best practice in Management Studio for this task? I mean it must be a task we all gets confronted with in larger projects.
If you do it with management studio it's all restricted to your own head. YOU will have to keep track of all the changes etc. I find that Redgates SQL Compare 8 and SQL Data Compare 7 does the trick. I recently moved the structure of a production database over to something totally different within minutes thanks to Redgate.
I have earlier tried to use Management Studio but it does not perform very well at complex tasks.
You really should be keeping your database schema in version control along with your source code.
What's wrong with it not being in the IDE? It has its own interface.
This tool save me hours a day. Not only because I dont HAVE to remember everything, but I then dont have to fix the production server if I missed something. I can work on multiple systems and push updates to each of them in a 10th of the time it would take me in the Management Studio.
This tool is by far the best 3rd party tool ive used for sql server. Its a godsend. A cheap one at that.
Just dont have the arrow pointing the wrong way ;-)
Okay I just bought Redgate :)
I have worked with it before so i can only agree that it is state of the art, I was just stunned to realize that Management Studio don't have anything that corresponds to this.
Thanks for the great answers!
Stackoverflow really is the pleace to ask these kinda things.
Related
I have two server machines (One for development, other for Clients) with SQL Server 2008 installations. Whenever a developer makes changes to tables/views/stored procedures in the Development Server, it needs to reflect the Client Server as well.
Currently, I am manually handling all changes like new columns in Tables, changes in Stored procedures etc. Can DB scripts or replication automate the entire procedure for me? Or is there some better solution to keep database schemas consistent.
Help will be highly appreciated.
Thanks!
I highly recommend to create an environment where all schema changes are done exclusively through SQL scripts - never "manually" in any environment. Each developer has to commit the script related to his/her bugfixed (or new features) to a version control system.
Typically you'd have one big script that creates the database from scratch and one for each version upgrade (from 1.0 to 1.1, one from 1.1 to 1.2 and so on)
If you have the man power it is also very handy to maintain one "from-scratch" script for each version. Whether you need that or not depends on how often an installation on an empty system is done.
We have very good experience with using Liquibase to maintain all this. It automatically keeps track which patches have been applied to a database and which need to be run during an upgrade. It also prevents you to run the same migration twice.
A problem that all database applications have, and a difficult one to resolve. Such a solution cannot be scheduled, as the changes made by developers need to be tested first, and you certainly don't want untested code merged with your live database. This question is of interest to me because I'm currently writing a generic solution to resolve this issue once and for all.
But in the meantime, we're using an open-source product called Open DBDiff (Google it - you can't miss it), which could do with some polishing but works well enough. You pass it your source and target databases, and it generates a script to make the target the same as the source. It does seem to have some trouble copying assemblies and user roles, but for everything, I haven't had any trouble.
I believe a human should do the deployments, after making sure the changes have been tested and properly checked into the source control. This is not something to automate fully.
Human should use the tools though. I use Visual Studio 2010 Professional, which has a powerful schema comparison tool, generates and executes deployment scripts and has source control integration.
servers all sql server 2008, and win xp
i have the following task
create a huge database, DONE
distribute it to the 20 waiting servers!!
if there were two or three i would have taken the trouble of creating the db's on all of using sql server managemnt stdio
but i am guessing that there is an efficient way
please note,
only the copy of the database structure, the schema is needed not the values within the cells!
thank you
Or of course you should have been creating the scripts as you went along and putting them in Source control. Then you would have exactly which scripts you needed for this version of the software and be used to doing the same thing for later modifications. You would also script the data inserts for any lookup tables you need to build.
Not having that, you can script the entire database. or use a SQL compare tool. But I strongly urge you to start treating database code like all other code and scripting, storing it in source control and versioning it. Life is so much better when you do that.
What Gabriel McAdams has shown, or, Redgate SQL Compare does this very nicely also.
If you can spare the moolah, using a tool like Red Gate's SQL Packager is an option i have used in the past and it works well!
The tool can do a lot more as well and may not be worth the spend though if you do not need the other features!
In that case, Gabriels'option above is definitely the easiest one to go with!
yesterday i went for an interview to be a sql / .net developer. my experience with sql is limited to basic pl/sql with oracle. they drilled me "do you know ssrs, do you know tsql, etc" well i kept saying no because i havent worked with them.
question: what do i have to learn in order to be able to work with microsoft sql? is it really that much different than oracle?
Grab a copy of SQL Server Express (see here) and start playing with it. There are sample databases that you can download to get you started.
SQL is the same, as it's a standard. T-SQL is an add on that has some flavors that are helpful to know. The way you setup procedures, functions, etc. is also different than PL-SQL, so that would be good to read up on. Outside the SQL Server engine and the various built-in tools, there are a lot of other MS products:
SSRS - SQL Server Reporting Services features a reporting engine, which are developed in Visual Studio.
SSIS - SQL Server Integration Services is a data import/export, etc. process, it's very handy to use for data import/export and other batch processing
SSAS - Analysis Services for OLAP
And so on. I don' tknow that SSAS helps you in this regard, but SSRS is pretty big so as a developer, reporting is a key feature and that would be handy to know something about. SSIS is good to know a little bit about, but might not be that handy, depending on what the org's needs are.
HTH.
SQL is pretty much SQL. There are some engine-specific differences but for most apps they're not significant. The management tools are obviously different. The OOB tools are vastly different.
SSRS is a reporting package (think Crystal reports on double steroids and you'd be close) not a DB engine. That should be listed as a separate job requirement.
I'd say get an MSDN license OR the free trial for SQL Server and install them all and try them out. Bookstore is a fairly generic app that you can extend forever and tryout new things.
Just keep in mind that someone hiring you is still going to want actual app experience, not your trials. If you can't get it at work, volunteer at an organization.
A good place to start is reading the MSDN SQL Server resource page. You'll find good information there about the whole MS SQL Ecosystem.
Then get a trial license, a virtual machine and start playing around.
It's kinda limited to their knowledge, as if you know basic ANSI sql then you can get almost all the basics running on SQL Server as they have a common base. As for SSRS, that is specific and will require reading and playing with it to learn. The SQL2008 Express with Advanced services should help you out.
With .net developer interviews I've been to they expect you to know the basics at minimum and be able to do joins and stuff in sql. Learning how to do temp tables and stored procedures as well as updates/selects/deletes and stuff should get you a bit further.
Potentially if they want that kinda experience either they are aiming the roll too low, or you've managed to slip through the net for a higher level role (which is sometimes a good thing) :-)
At my company, our current method of updating the database is to connect using the Server Explorer in VS2005, then modify the stored procedures by opening them and editing. The devs here seem to enjoy that "write and save it like it's code" mentality. It is pretty convenient, how it automatically turns Create into Alter and runs the scripts against the existing database when we need to tweak something.
Recently, this bit us pretty hard during a server crash when we lost a lot of changes that hadn't gotten backed up. I'm pushing to move our SQL development where it belongs: in DB Projects so we can put them into SVN along with the othe code. The alternative is nightly back-ups of the database.
I don't know much about DB projects though, or how the workflow with them is. I'm afraid that if I can't get something of similar utility to their current model, they just won't switch. Any thoughts on maintaining our current working model, but switching over to DB Projects?
If the developers make the rules (and your post sounds like they do), you can only proceed if the new workflow is "better" to them. Being a developer myself, I think that's the way it should be. I've seen some non-developers think up pretty nonsensical development processes, and force them on the developers to everyone's detriment.
If you're thinking about VS DB projects, you'd first test if VS DB actually works with your database. If it does, you'd have to set up a big chance in process: the "true" copy of the database is now in VS DB instead of the database server.
Another way out is to backup the development server regularly. If you back it up daily, and a transaction log backup every hour, it becomes very hard to loose a significant amount of work.
Or create a scheduled job that writes the entire database definition to a text file. (Script all objects in database.) These files are usually very small, so you can keep a long backlog.
Many respected bloggers seem to think storing database definitions in SVN is a good idea. See this coding horror post, or related Stack Overflow related question How do I version my MS SQL database in SVN.
Talk it over with the developers and see what you can agree on.
What is the best way to keep large projects organized with SSMS?
I want to do something like:
ProjectRoot
SchemaObjects
Tables
Constraints
Indexes
Keys
Functions
Views
Stored Procedures
Scripts
DataGeneration
And so on, but I cannot find a nice way to do this... Any suggestions?
I don't think there's anyway way to do this in SMSS, at least not in 2005.
Maybe a third party tool will give you this; there's a list of replacements for 2000 Enterprise Manager here; not the most current, but probably a good starting point.
Sadly there isn't. Maintain your object scripts out side of SSMS and simply edit them in SSMS.
IMHO this is one thing that is lacking big time in SSMS.