jb's Blog

So there was a reasonable big announcement in the Team System space today, and that was announcing a new role based SKU which is targetted at database professionals - Im thinking very much database developers in a software dev cycle rather than admins.

Here is the feature set:

• A new Visual Studio Database Project allows you to import your database schema and place it under source control. When the time comes to deploy schema changes the new project system allows you to quickly build update scripts or packages and then provides a mechanism to deploy them to the database of our choice.
• Rename Refactoring allows you to easily rename any object in your database and be assured that all references to that object will be renamed to correspond to the change
• A New T-SQL Editor allows you to be more productive when writing T-SQL code from within Visual Studio including support for parallel execution of queries and viewing of execution plans.
• SchemaCompare allows you to quickly compare the schema of two databases (or your source controlled project and a database) and script updates to bring the database schemas into sync
• DataCompare allows you to quickly compare two databases and script updates to bring the data in these databases into sync
• The Database Unit Testing infrastructure allows you to create database unit tests using T-SQL or managed code.
• DataGenerator lets you create data generation plans that produce repeatable sets of meaningful data based upon your existing production databases that can be deployed to a database prior to running unit tests thus ensuring consistent test results

So all of this actually looks very promising and looks competitive with a number of other tools in the SQL Server space which provide similar capabilities. Whats also great to see if that there is follow up on the promise of delivering the additional role based capabilities as part of this version of Team System - this was defintitely something that was talked about back prior to release - good stuff from the Team System product team!!

There is a CTP of this SKU due out soon - June 11 - so I think it will be well worth checking out So in all likelyhood you will be seeing a follow up around that time with some thoughts on how it all looks..