14Apr 2010 by Grant Fritchey 3 Comments

SNESSUG 4/14/2010

Misc, Visual Studio
Tonight's Southern New England SQL Server Users group is sponsored by Idera. Our presenter is Scott Abrants of Iron Mountain. He's talking about deploying databases using Visual Studio Team System:Database Edition. We have a good turnout with 12 people (yeah, we're small). Scott's presentation was a lot of fun and very informative. He's very involved with automating his deployments to a fare-thee-well. He really has Visual Studio dancing and singing. It was a very thorough overview of the VSTS:DBE soltuion. Other user groups should be jealous that we got to see this presentation.
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13Apr 2010 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

Southern New England SQL Server Users Group

Misc
Tomorrow, Wednesday April 14th, is the next SNESSUG meeting. We're going to get a great presentation from Scott Abrants on using Visual Studio Team System for database deployments. I saw Scott presenting this at SQL Saturday:Boston to a packed room. If you didn't get to see it then, come on down to Rhode Island tomorrow evening. You won't be sorry.
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19Mar 2009 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Database.sqlpermissions

Visual Studio
Raise your hand if you think this is a real pain in the bottom method for editing user permissions? Yeah, me too. Visual Studio Team System Database Edition is far to fine a tool to make us edit XML to set database user permissions. A co-worker has posted a change request on MS Connect. Connect works really well as long as people vote for what you report. I've seen several things change in SQL Server or get fixed primarily because of the reports in Connect. So if doing this: <PermissionStatement Action="GRANT">      <Permission>EXECUTE</Persmission>     <Grantee>UserRole</Grantee>      <Object Name="dbo" Type="SCHEMA"/> </PermissionStatement> Makes you crazy and you would rather type this: GRANT EXECUTE ON SCHEMA :: dbo TO UserRole ; Then click on the link and get the word in front out to Microsoft.
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03Mar 2009 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

MSDN Magazine: Article on VSTS:DB

Visual Studio
Jamie Laflen and Barclay Hill have published an article in MSDN Magazine outlining the new features in in VSTS:DB GDR. The description of the intent and use of the server project is extremely enlightening. I wasn't aware of the master.dbschema files available for use within a project. Luckily I haven't needed them yet. Another thing I wasn't aware of, if you use the refactoring tools, say rename a table, not only does it save you a lot of typing, but the project will remember that the table was renamed and instead of dropping and recreating it in the next deployment, it will issue SP_RENAME. I'm spreading that word to my team right now. Another good point is that you can make a configuration to work only on your local machine…
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04Feb 2009 by Grant Fritchey 1 Comment

VSTS:DB Composite Projects

Tools, Visual Studio
I've seen several searches go by from people who are looking for how to create composite projects. Here's a quick run-down. In the example, I'm going to create a main database project called BaseDB, a server project called MyServer, and a composite project that combines the two called Comp. This project is just another database project as you can see in Figure 1: [caption id="attachment_379" align="alignnone" width="450" caption="New Database Project"][/caption] Once the new project is created, you need to right click on the References object in the Solution Explorer. Figure 2: From the pop-up menu select Add Database Reference. The window in Figure 3 will pop up: [caption id="attachment_383" align="alignnone" width="450" caption="Add Database Reference"][/caption] You can select the other projects for a dynamic view into their changes, or for a…
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02Feb 2009 by Grant Fritchey 3 Comments

Visual Studio Team System Database Edition Best Practices

Visual Studio
Barclay Hill, Program Manager for Visual Studio Team System Database Edition at Microsoft has just launched a new blog that I'm excited about. He's going to be blogging on best practices for VSTS:DB. His initial post outlines the topics he hopes to address and it's an impressive list. I responded immediately with an offer to help because I'm using the tool and struggling a bit to get it to do everything we need and because I really like all that VSTS:DB has done for me and my team already. Any one else interested in pitching in should go over there and get involved. Here's what I sent as an initial message: I saw your blog post and request for interest and participation and decided to pitch in. The company where…
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20Jan 2009 by Grant Fritchey 2 Comments

Incremental Deployments using Visual Studio Database Edition GDR

Tools, Visual Studio
I'm stuck. I've been advocating that our company use composite projects for our deployments using the VSTSDBE GDR (Visual Studio Team System Database Edition, General Distribution Release for those not instantly geeky).  In a nutshell, VSTSDBE offers two mechanisms for deployment across multiple environments. Both of these work wonderfully well for automation when you are doing a full tear-down and rebuild. When you're doing incremental deployments, they both fail. Option 1: Use SQL Command variables to set environment specific variables such as file location, etc., and post-deployment scripts to set security. This works. It's the method we used prior to the GDR. Unfortunately, security and other environment specific information is hidden inside scripts rather than visible to a given configuration directly within the VS interface. Option 2: Create a composite…
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18Nov 2008 by Grant Fritchey No Comments

Still no Joy in Mudville: GDR RC0

PASS, Tools, Visual Studio
The guys at Microsoft tried to recreate the problem I was having and were unable to. It probably means I've got a bad uninstall of CTP17 or something. Since I'm running on a virtual it won't affect me in the future since I can toss it, but that doesn't help for the PASS Presentation tomorrow. So, no demo at the end of the presentation, just a bit of tap dancing. It'll be fine, but I would that it were otherwise.
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