October 10, 2006 at 10:14 am
We need to implement change management in our shop, and I am wondering what experiences you have had with various CM products ?
What we want to do is to put version control on stored procs, user-defined functions and DTS packages; be able to recover an earlier version of any of these if we put a bad one in by mistake; sync databases; promote databases from Development to Production environments; get alerts when changes occur outside version control ... that sort of thing.
We have seen various products that offer all or some of these features (usually some). A thing called SQLDBControl looks fairly promising to us at present, but ... there's no substitute for the experience of the pros to guide the way.
What's been your experience ?
Thanks for any help !!
October 11, 2006 at 3:32 am
Ethan,
Your choices really depend on your budget and how savvy the rest of your technical staff are. I don't have much experience of any of the big change management solutions but as a contractor have a proven, cheap and functional method of change control in a SQL Server development environment.
I tend to find an existing VSS (Visual Source Safe) install in 99% of environments I enter so leverage that with the use of Visual Studio (VS) 2003/2005 database projects. This has the benefit that it fits in with most exsiting (Microsoft) developers change management processes (these guys are usually the main culprits for skipping checking in/out and release processes). This allows you to script all your sprocs, UDF's and DTS packages (if you save them as VBScript files), everyone then adds the Database Project in to there current local Visual Studio Solution and checks the project components in and out as they work on them. You can also create Command Files for deployment of all components (with VS Professional onwards) against defined Database References. Using the labelling, versioning and sharing functionality within VSS then allows you to control your change management. However the major problem with this solution is that people can step putside of the process and make changes to databases without checking code out etc.. however I find it is a good balance between change management and keeps the bureaucrats happy.
Another option that i'm looking to employ soon is that of the hottly awaited Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition for Database Professional http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/teamsystem/products/dbpro/default.aspx
The idea of this is that the true picture of your database is held within VS as a Database Project (with support for all objects), thus you don't have to rely on the Production instance for your truth.
ll
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