A bright new world for database development
Today we have announced Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals (we can't even make a pronouncable acronym from that). In short, Team System Data is about changing the way that databases are developed and maintained and enabling an agile database world. For far too long database tools have done a great job of Rapid Database Screw-up with tools that directly manipulate live databases. A number of solutions have floated around such as modeling, repositories, and painful versioning of "patch scripts" but nothing has taken on the problem in an integrated complete environment.
Our new Team Edition product is a part of the Team Suite meaning we can leverage all the great functionality provided by Team Foundation Server such as automated work-item tracking, reporting, version control and configuration management. From this collaborative platform foundation we provide a few key capabilities:
1 -- an off-line, versionable project system -- All database development in TSData is done off-line, we provide full dependency analysis and keep your entire database organized.
2 -- managed code evolution -- we have tools to help you make changes including Database Refactoring (cascading changes) again all under version control with a simple set of tools that let you understand the impact of your changes
3 -- ensure changes -- changing a database can be a risky business, a key piece of TSData is Unit Testing for databases. This lets you build tests and run them to ensure that changes don't break existing systems. This functionality is combined with a new test data generation facility to that you can ensure your test server is in a consistent state and not require production data.
Over the comming weeks we will have a growing amount of information available in blogs and at our team site. In addition, check out the blogs of Gert ER Drapers (aka The Data Dude) and Cameron Skinner (our hard charging captain).
