The First One

So, I have re-named the data structures.  I used the database project template in Visual Studio 2010, and to be honest I wasn’t impressed. As a database management project tool, I found it almost impossible to commit the updated changes back to the database.

But first, let me look at what I did and what I liked and what I didn’t like at each step.  My first step was to use a clean install of the project and get that imported into the database project.  That worked pretty well.  It created one file for each database object (stored procedure, table etc.) which I thought was great.  It created a good structure which was pretty easy to understand (for a non DBA like me).

To me, this structure is very similar to the structure that you see in the MS SQL Studio, which is a good thing in my mind.

Then I did one of the items on my version 2 list for the project, to rename the database tables.  The refactoring was very much in line with the way code gets refactored in VS2010.  It was quick and easy, and every reference was renamed.  Needless to say I did like that.

Now to the parts I didn't like.  I wanted to set one of the tables to save the data within as it was part of the project, not the dynamic data of the system usage. I could not work out how to do this.  I would have thought that a database project would have been able to allocate some default data to the tables, if not mark some tables as having all their data from the project loaded into the implementation of the project.

This leads to my next problem.  I got the source data structure from a database.  I made a relatively simple if somewhat extensive change.  I then wanted to update the database with the changes and it would not update.  Kept on returning a user error or something.  I am going to be honest here.  This to me is the core of a database project.  Writing scripts is one thing.  The ability to use a GUI to manage the code is awesome.  The UX for updating the data structures is not.

As a result, at this time I am not going to use the database project for my changes.  At least until I am able to resolve the 2 issues that I have encountered so far.  So, at this stage I have renamed the database tables, and am about to tackle another of the items on the list.