The new book is available in a free download from Red Gate. I had a lot of fun working on the three chapters that I did for this book. The topics I received are near & dear to me because of all the time I’ve spent working on getting databases into source control and automating (as much as possible) the deployment of databases out of source control. Everything I go over in the book might not be 100% applicable to your situation, but I’m pretty sure almost anyone involved in database development and deployment can find some useful information there. For those who are interested, I don’t just cover Red Gate tools in the book either. There’s quite a bit of time spent describing how to automate deployments using Visual Studio Team System 2010. I also go through ways you can collect and manage code snippets (the best being to use SQL Prompt, but there are others).

I’ve been reading the rest of the book and it’s filled with excellent information too. Yeah, you may already have a naming standard or you might already feel that you’ve got your schema well in hand and you might not see the utility of testing databases. But, read through this book and I’ll bet you pick up one or two things in almost every chapter. The guys who worked on this, Phil Factor (blog|twitter), Alex Kuznetsov (blog) and Mladen Prajdic (blog|twitter), are extremely smart and very informed on all the topics they tackled. There really is something in this book for everyone… unless you’re that guy that is sitting all alone and does everything for the company. Most of the rest of us work on teams, even if the teams are small. Small or large, that’s who this book is written for.

If you want to move your database development game up another notch, I strongly recommend taking a look